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The story begins with unemployed Mannu (Ajay Devgn), from Bhagalpur in search of money to finance his new business as he has lost his earlier job at a jute mill. On his quest, he visits Neeru (Aishwarya Rai) in Calcutta, to whom he was engaged six years ago. During the rainy evening, the couple reminisce about their former love and how each ended up in their current situation. Neeru pretends to lead a happy and prosperous life. She gestures to her former lover during various instances, particularly when the door bell rings and she persuades Mannu not to open the door. They go on talking about their past and present with multiple flashbacks. The raincoat comes to play when Neeru wears it to go out and fetch some food. The landlord (Annu Kapoor) speaks of the real situation of the household, and prompts Mannu to give his borrowed money as rent for the house. Mannu leaves a letter under the bed sheet explaining things. When Neeru returns he does not say anything about his encounter with her landlord. After some time Mannu leaves. Later, when he puts his hand inside the pocket of his raincoat, he finds a pair of gold bangles that belonged to Neeru, along with a letter saying that she had a lot of money and he should have told her about his financial situation. She had actually read a letter that was inside the raincoat that informed her about Mannu's condition. 

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; Characters * Dr. Prentice * Geraldine Barclay * Mrs. Prentice * Nicholas Beckett * Dr. Rance * Sergeant Match The play consists of two acts—though the action is continuous—and revolves around a Dr. Prentice, a psychiatrist attempting to seduce his attractive prospective secretary, Geraldine Barclay. The play opens with the doctor examining Geraldine Barclay in a job interview. As part of the interview, he persuades her to undress. The situation becomes more intense during Dr. Prentice's supposed "interview" with Geraldine Barclay when Mrs Prentice enters. When his wife enters, he attempts to cover up his activity by hiding the girl behind a curtain. His wife, however, is also being seduced and blackmailed by a Nicholas Beckett. She, therefore, promises Nicholas the post as secretary, which adds further confusion, including Nicholas, Geraldine and a police officer dressing as a member of the opposite sex. Dr. Prentice's clinic is also faced with a government inspection, led by Dr. Rance, which reveals the chaos in the clinic. Dr. Rance talks about how he will use the situation to develop a new book: "The final chapters of my book are knitting together: incest, buggery, outrageous women and strange love-cults catering for depraved appetites. All the fashionable bric-a-brac." A penis ("the missing parts of Sir Winston Churchill") is held aloft in the climactic scene. 

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In 1850, nine years after the events of the first film, California is voting on whether to join the United States of America as a state. Alejandro Murrieta/Zorro, now known as Don Alejandro De La Vega, foils a plot to steal the ballots, but during the fight with a gunman named Jacob McGivens, he briefly loses his mask. A pair of Pinkerton agents sees his face and recognize him. The following day, the Pinkertons confront Alejandro's wife, Elena, and blackmail her into divorcing him. Three months later, the separation from Elena and his son Joaquin, and the feeling that the people no longer need Zorro, are taking its toll on Alejandro. His childhood guardian, Father Felipe, convinces him to attend a party at French Count Armand's new vineyard. There, Alejandro discovers that Elena is dating the count, an admirer from her time spent in Europe. After leaving the party, Alejandro witnesses a huge explosion close to Armand's mansion and becomes suspicious of him. McGivens leads an attack on the family of Guillermo Cortez, Alejandro's friend, to seize their land deed. Donning his mask again, Zorro rescues Guillermo's wife and son, but fails to save Guillermo and the deed. Zorro follows McGivens to Armand's mansion and discovers that Armand plans to build a railroad on Cortez's land. He also encounters Elena and, learning of an upcoming shipment, he tracks McGivens to a cove where the cargo is delivered. Unbeknownst to him, Joaquin also hitched a ride on McGiven's cart, having sneaked out of a class trip. Zorro saves his son from the bandits and, examing the shipment, he sees a piece of the cargo - a bar of soap - and the name Orbis Unum on a crate lid. Upon researching the phrase, Felipe and Alejandro learn that Armand is the head of a secret society, the Knights of Aragon, which has been secretly ruling Europe. The United States is deemed a threat to the Knights, so they plan to throw the country into chaos before it can gain too much power. Alejandro is captured by the Pinkertons, who reveal that they forced Elena to divorce Alejandro in order to get close to Armand and learn of his plans without the aid of Zorro, as they dislike Zorro and his vigilante ways. Joaquin frees Alejandro from captivity. Zorro goes to Armand's mansion, meets Elena, and eavesdrops on Armand's meeting. He learns that the soap bars are secretly used as an ingredient for nitroglycerin, which Armand plans to distribute throughout the Confederate army, with the help of Confederate Colonel Beauregard, to destroy the Union. Zorro and Elena reconcile, and Zorro prepares to destroy the train carrying the explosives. McGivens arrives at Felipe's church to look for Zorro. Unable to find him, McGivens shoots the priest and kidnaps Joaquin. Meanwhile, however, Armand's butler Ferroq tracks down and kills the Pinkertons and informs his master about Elena's deception. Armand confronts Elena, and takes her and Joaquin hostage on the train carrying the explosives, making Zorro unable to destroy it. Zorro is captured and unmasked in front of his son. Armand takes Joaquin and Elena away and orders McGivens to kill Alejandro. Felipe, having been saved from McGivens's bullet by the cross he wears, arrives, and he and Alejandro overpower and kill McGivens. Zorro catches up with Armand, and they engage in a sword fight. Meanwhile, Elena has Joaquin escape into the back cars of the train, which she disconnects. Elena fights Ferroq in the nitro storage car and throws him and a bottle of nitro out of the car and at the feet of Colonel Beauregard at their prearranged meeting point, killing them. Further along the tracks, the governor prepares to sign the bill to make California a Union state. Joaquin collects Tornado, Zorro's horse, jumps off the train, and overtakes it. He hits a track switch, causing the train to harmlessly pass around the ceremony. Zorro and Armand's duel takes them to the very front of the train engine. Seeing the track is a dead end, Zorro hooks Armand to the train by tying him up on the front of the engine and escapes with Elena. The train crashes into the pile of rails at the end of the track, setting off the nitroglycerin, killing Armand and destroying the train. With Zorro as an official witness, the governor signs the bill, and California becomes the 31st state of the United States of America. Felipe remarries Alejandro and Elena, and Alejandro apologizes to his son for hiding his identity, admitting that Zorro's identity is a family secret rather than just his own. With Elena's support, Zorro rides off on Tornado to his next mission. 

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Alan Block is a teenage city slicker with his whole summer planned out. That is, until his parents invite Vic over, a charming wilderness survival guide. Vic convinces them that six weeks off the grid is exactly what Alan needs to become a man. Alan reluctantly joins Vic and three other teens –– Chris, Mitch and George –– for a trek into the great outdoors, which turn out to be not so great for him. He is taunted by Chris and George and learns that Vic is deadly serious about his job, but he does form a friendship with Mitch. On their first night, Alan carves his initials into a tree. After Vic finds out, he calls the others to vote on his punishment. They take away his knife. In another incident, the group goes swimming at a nearby river, where Alan and Mitch listen to a ballgame on the radio, but Vic confiscates the radio, declaring they've left all that behind them. Later on, Vic asks Alan to be his bowman while white water rafting. Alan is unprepared and loses an oar. While Vic praises Alan's efforts, Alan feels he was set up to fail. Later, Vic asks the boys to cross a dangerous swing bridge. Alan crosses it with the others but leaves their tent poles behind. When he later realizes this, Vic sends him back to collect them alone. Despite his best efforts, he fails to cross the bridge, when a rope snaps, nearly making him fall. Embarrassed, Alan claims that he could not find them but Vic catches him in his lie; he watched him all along and even retrieved the poles. The tension between Alan and Vic reaches a breaking point when the group go fishing on an island. Instead of following Vic's lead and catching them with his bare hands, Alan invents a fish trap. Furious, Vic tosses the fish he caught and forces him to clean the others’ fish. Alan refuses and Vic leaves with the group, stranding him on the island until the fish are cleaned. Alan stays on the island for the night and does not complete the task. The next morning, Vic sends the others to retrieve him. When they return, they find that Vic has disappeared. The boys fight with each other about what to do and take cover after a storm hits. Out of the blue, Vic returns the next morning and praises their survival skills. Although everyone has grown weary of Vic, they follow him on their next group activity of climbing Devil's Tooth –– a treacherous peak. When they reach a gap, Vic creates a pendulum for the boys to swing over it. Alan is last to go but is the only one who does not make the jump. Despite the others’ protests, and Alan's pleas for help, Vic leaves Alan dangling and instructs him to figure his own way out of it. Chris challenges Vic's leadership and Vic retaliates by holding him over the edge of a cliff. Left to his own devices, Alan mangages to climb out of the gam, and create enough momentum to swing across. When he catches up to the others, everyone is impressed with him, but Alan declares this was the last straw, and the other boys agree, and they demand to end the trip. Vic refuses and the boys set off on their own. They reach the canoes the next day, but Vic catches up to them, and a heated confrontation ensues. Furious, Chris throws rocks at Vic and hits him with an oar –– sending him over the edge of a ravine. After Vic suffers a broken leg and becomes stranded, Alan creates a pulley and the group hoist him out of the ravine. As the group's new leader, Alan instructs the others to follow the river to the ranger station. With Vic stable but losing blood, Alan sits him in a canoe and they raft down a wild river. Alan skillfully navigates the rapids but the canoe capsizes after plunging down a small waterfall. Alan brings Vic to the riverbanks. The two share a moment of camaraderie and, soon enough, a rescue helicopter arrives. An older Alan mentions that the other three boys were rescued as well, and he and Vic made their piece. Also, every summer since, Alan has taken a trip to visit nature... in Central Park! 

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King Xerxes of Persia leads a vast army of soldiers into Europe to defeat the small city-states of Greece, not only to fulfill the idea of "one world ruled by one master", but also to avenge the defeat of his father Darius at the Battle of Marathon ten years before. Accompanying him are Artemisia, the Queen of Halicarnassus, who beguiles Xerxes with her feminine charm, and Demaratus, an exiled king of Sparta, to whose warnings Xerxes pays little heed. In Corinth, Themistocles of Athens wins the support of the Greek allies and convinces both the delegates and the Spartan representative, warrior king Leonidas I, to grant Sparta leadership of their forces. Outside the hall, Leonidas and Themistocles agree to fortify the narrow pass at Thermopylae until the rest of the army arrives. After this, Leonidas learns of the Persian advance and travels to Sparta to spread the news and rally the rest of the troops. In Sparta, his fellow king Leotychidas is fighting a losing battle with the Ephors over the religious harvest festival of Carnea that is due to take place, with members of the council arguing that the army should wait until after the festival is over before it marches, while Leotychidas fears that by that time the Persians may have conquered Greece. Leonidas decides to march north immediately with his personal bodyguard of 300 men, who are exempt from the decisions of the Ephors and the Gerousia. They are subsequently reinforced by about 700 volunteer Thespians led by Demophilus and few other Greek allies. After several days of fighting, Xerxes grows angry as his army is repeatedly routed by the Greeks, with the Spartans in the forefront. Leonidas receives word sent by his wife that, by decision of the Ephors, the remainder of the Spartan army, rather than joining him as he had expected, will only fortify the isthmus in the Peloponnese and will advance no further. The Greeks constantly beat back the Persians, and following the defeat of most of his personal bodyguard in battle against the Spartans plus the killing/death of Xerxes' own two brothers, Xerxes begins to consider withdrawing to Sardis until he can equip a larger force at a later date. As he prepares to withdraw, as advised by Artemesia (who, having a Greek mother, has her own agenda to dissuade the king from continuing invasion), Xerxes however, receives word from the treacherous and avaricious Ephialtes of a secret old goat-track through the mountains that will enable his forces to attack the Greeks from the rear. Promising to richly reward the traitorous goatherd for his betrayal (just as Ephialtes had expected) an emboldened Xerxes sends his army onward. Once Leonidas realizes he will be surrounded, he sends away the Greek allies to alert the cities to the south. Being too few to hold the pass, the Spartans instead attack the Persian front, where Xerxes is nearby. Leonidas is killed in the melée. Meanwhile, the Thespians, who had refused to leave, are overwhelmed (offscreen) while defending the rear. Surrounded, the surviving Spartans refuse Xerxes's demand to give up Leonidas' body. They are then all annihilated as the remaining Immortals rain down a barrage of arrowfire. After this, narration states that the Battle of Salamis and the Battle of Plataea end the Persian invasion, which could not have been organized and victorious without the time bought by the 300 Spartans who defied the tyranny of Xerxes at Thermopylae. One of the final images of the film is the stone memorial bearing the epigram of Simonides of Ceos, which the narrator recites in honour of the slain 300 Spartan men's bravery : "Oh stranger, tell the Spartans that we lie here obedient to their word." Then ends with : "...But it was more than a victory for Greece, it was a stirring example to free people throughout the world of what a few brave men can accomplish once they refuse to submit to tyranny!" 

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Notably in this utopian community women are only permitted to earn half as much as men and cannot vote. Divorce is unknown and Intermere's citizens are said not to have a sense of humor. 

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At a town hall, Mayor Quimby fields suggestions on ways to improve Springfield's dwindling economy. Principal Skinner suggests the town legalize gambling to rejuvenate its economy; everyone, including frequent naysayer Marge, likes the idea. Mr. Burns and Mayor Quimby work together to build a casino, where Homer is hired as a blackjack dealer. Burns designs the casino himself, with his likeness atop a mermaid's body adorning its neon sign. While waiting for Homer's shift to end, Marge finds a quarter on the casino floor and uses it to play a slot machine. When she wins, she immediately becomes addicted to gambling. Bart is too young to gamble at Burns' Casino, so he starts his own casino in his tree house, tricking Robert Goulet into performing there. Burns grows even richer from his casino, but his appearance and mental state deteriorate, making him resemble Howard Hughes. He develops paranoia and a profound fear of microscopic germs, urinating in jars and wearing tissue boxes instead of shoes on his feet. Marge spends all her time at the casino and neglects her family. She fails to notice when Maggie crawls away from the slots and is nearly mauled by a white tiger from Gunter and Ernst's circus act. She forgets to help Lisa make a costume for her geography pageant, forcing her to wear one poorly designed by her father. Homer bursts into the casino searching for Marge. Security cameras capture his rampage, causing Burns to demote him to his old job at the power plant. After realizing how much he misses the plant, Burns decides to return to it. When Homer confronts Marge with her behavior, she realizes that she has a gambling problem. Lisa wins a special prize in the geography pageant because Homer's poor costume design makes the judges think she did it all by herself. Ralph receives the same prize for his primitive costume: a note taped to his shirt that reads "Idaho". Robert Goulet 

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Two police officers patrolling the streets of New York City's Bowery discuss the lamentable fact that most of the young boys in the neighborhood will turn to crime and end up in jail. One exception, they agree, is Danny Breslin (Bobby Jordan), a young boxer who is studying economics and destined for success. While Danny's future looks bright, the future of his former best friend, Muggs McGinnis (Leo Gorcey), appears to hold little more than troubles with the law and juvenile probation. One day, when Danny learns that Muggs has been speaking poorly of his schoolteacher sister Mary (Charlotte Henry), he marches over to Clancy's Pool Hall, their favorite neighborhood haunt, and punches Muggs. The fight eventually turns into a pool hall riot, which results in Muggs's arrest. Officer Tom Brady (Warren Hull), Mary's sweetheart, believes that many of the boys can be reformed, and when he learns that Muggs has been involved in another fight, he tries to enlist Danny's help in determining the reason behind Muggs' propensity to fight. Danny surprises his mother, sister and Tom when he violently protests Tom's request, saying that he hates "coppers," and vows never to return to the police gym for his boxing practice. While Tom lays plans to reform Muggs by entering him as a fighter in the upcoming Golden Glove Tournament, Danny unwittingly gets involved with notorious thug Monk Martin (Bobby Stone). Unknown to Danny, Monk has used him to drive his getaway car in a grocery store holdup. After paying Danny for his "services," Monk manages to persuade him to quit school and join his racket. Meanwhile, Muggs, having made great strides at the Whitney reform school, goes to live with Tom and his mother (Martha Wentworth), much to the dismay of Mary, who promptly breaks off her relationship with Tom. Muggs eventually wins the respect of the entire neighborhood and earns the police department's sponsorship of his fight in the Golden Glove Tournament. So completely has Muggs given up his delinquent ways that he curses Monk when the racketeer offers him $1,000 to take a fall in the tournament fight. Later, after overhearing Tom's mother blaming his arrival for the break-up of Tom and Mary's relationship, Muggs becomes despondent and decides to move out. Just before the fight, crooked fight promoter Slats Morrison (Eddie Foster) plants the intended bribery money in Muggs's gear and tries to frame him. Danny, meanwhile, is wounded by Tom as he and Monk are caught fleeing from a robbery. Hospitalized and in desperate need of blood, Danny's life hangs in the balance until Muggs volunteers his blood and saves his best friend. Mary has a change of heart and returns to Tom, and Tom announces that Monk made a full confession before dying. Danny's family gathers around a radio and listens with pride as Muggs knocks out his opponent at the tournament. Following the fight, Slats and his boss Dorgan are arrested, and Tom and Mary look forward to their wedding. 

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The story opens 60 years after the events of The 7th Guest. It is now 1995, and the player assumes the role of Carl Denning, an investigative reporter for the television series "Case Unsolved". Robin Morales, his producer and lover, mysteriously vanished three weeks prior in Harley-on-the-Hudson, New York. She was investigating a series of grisly murders and disappearances that had plagued the otherwise sleepy upstate town over the last few months. Denning's only solid lead is a portable computer called the GameBook delivered with only a postmark from Harley. When booted, the GameBook displays Robin's plea to help her escape. The story then flashes back to the beginning of Robin's investigation. She interviews Eileen Wiley, the only person known to have survived an encounter with Henry Stauf's mansion. Eileen confirms she lost her hand that night, claiming it had been bitten off by a dog, but offers no other meaningful details of the encounter. Suspicious of Eileen's story, Robin interviews Dr. Thornton, who treated Eileen that night. Though the doctor appears to believe Eileen about the dog, the interview proves fruitful as Dr. Thornton reveals that Eileen was not alone that night; her friend Samantha Ford was with her in the house those 18 years ago. Samantha's family used its considerable influence to keep her involvement out of the papers. He also reveals that Samantha has been paralyzed from the waist down ever since the girls' encounter. Dr. Thornton's receptionist listens to the entire conversation through an intercom, demonstrating a strangely angry behavior. Robin attempts to interview Samantha, but their meeting is adversarial. Samantha's forceful denials convince Robin that the women are not telling the truth about their encounter. Samantha confirms Robin's suspicions later that evening when she visits Robin's motel room and shares her story. Samantha claims that during their encounter with the house, something supernatural held the girls down and raped them, then let them go, though the gate slammed shut on Eileen's hand as she tried to flee, severing it. After both women ended up pregnant, Samantha had an illegal abortion that resulted in her paralysis, but Eileen went through with the pregnancy and had a daughter, Marie. Samantha claims there was always something sinister about the child and believes that "all hell let loose" around Marie's 18th birthday, that Marie is the mansion's offspring, and that Marie is responsible for the murders and disappearances. Meanwhile, Robin begins to bud a romance with Jim Martin, the local police chief. Robin confronts Eileen with the story, and Eileen denies everything. Eileen then challenges Robin to go to the house herself. After Robin leaves it's revealed that Marie, who is Dr. Thornton's receptionist, was listening to the entire conversation again. Desperate to keep her secret from getting out, Marie commands her lover Chuck Lynch to murder Robin. It's revealed that Chuck and Marie were responsible for the recent murder spree: from time to time, at Marie's orders, Chuck would kill an innocent victim as a human sacrifice to "feed" the entity that inhabits Stauf's mansion. It is implied that Chuck, who is an adulterous business man, was getting benefits magically from the entity in exchange for the sacrifices. Chuck initially resists murdering Robin, worried about the media attention a famous disappearance would bring, but Marie convinces him by reminding him of the consequences for not helping Stauf. He enters Robin's hotel and stabs someone sleeping in bed, but he actually stabbed the police chief who had a budding romance with Robin. Unable to remove the knife, he takes the body to Stauf's mansion, where he is pulled inside and killed by Stauf for his mistake. Robin comes to the house soon after and enters as Samantha watches remotely, somehow having hacked into Stauf's surveillance. As Robin moves through the house, it psychologically breaks her by systematically confronting her with uncomfortable truths about her past. The story then picks up with Carl in the mansion. Eventually Robin meets Stauf and he begins to tempt her into joining him, by enticing her with her own television network and other advantages she can get by serving the entity. Carl watches the conversation between them through the GameBook and unsuccessfully tries to convince Robin to just leave the mansion with him. As Robin ignores Carl's pleas and accepts Stauf's offer, Samantha breaks into the GameBook transmission and reveals that she was the one who sent the GameBook to Carl hoping that he could rescue Robin and warns him that it is too late now. Unable to leave Robin at first, Carl follows her cries upstairs where he meets Stauf, who is presiding over a game show called "Let’s Make a Real Deal" (a parody of Let's Make a Deal). Stauf explains that Carl must choose to open one of the doors, then offers Carl $600. Carl can keep it, or he can pay $200 and reveal what's behind one of the three doors in front of him. He pays to reveal door number two, which turns out to be a large TV. Next, he pays door number one, which is Marie. As Stauf tempts Carl with Marie's sexual prowess, Samantha hacks into the TV behind door number two, warning him not to give in to temptation as Stauf mocks her paralysis. Finally, Carl pays to reveal door number three, which is Robin. She expresses her love for Carl, pleading with him to choose her. Samantha urges Carl to choose her, revealing that this will end Stauf forever and that choosing either of the others will doom him. The game turns Carl's choice over to the player, which reveals one of three endings: * Carl chooses Samantha: reaching out his hand to touch Samantha's on the TV. On the moment Carl touches the TV screen, he is teleported to Samantha's front door, and they watch the house burn to the ground on the same TV from the game show. Carl expresses regret about Robin, but Samantha laments that Robin was lost the moment she said "yes" to Stauf. Apparently, in this ending, the entity starved to death when Carl refused its offers and chose to just save himself. * Carl chooses Robin: Carl and Robin embrace as Samantha looks on in disappointment. The story then flashes forward weeks later, where Robin is in Carl's living room watching the news of his body being found in the Hudson River. The newscaster reports that he disappeared on his honeymoon in Harley-on-the-Hudson after marrying Robin, who is the new president of the Stauf Broadcasting System. It's possible that in this ending Robin took Chuck's former place as the "mansion feeder", and murdered Carl both as a sacrifice and to silence him after all he had witnessed inside of the mansion. * Carl chooses Marie: as Samantha and Robin look on, Carl gives in to Marie's temptations. Marie leads him through a door to another room, and as the two have sex, Marie morphs into Stauf. The Stauf/Marie hybrid then taunts Carl ironically congratulating him for his "wise choice" while eating cooked ribs, which they claim to be his. On the script of the game, after morphing into Stauf, Marie was supposed to morph into the entity that controls the mansion revealing its physical appearance, but it was scrapped from the final version of the game. 

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The First Doctor and Vicki find Steven Taylor aboard the TARDIS after he stumbled in during a disorientated state on Mechanus (The Chase). The TARDIS lands on a rocky beach and the Doctor establishes the century from a discarded Viking helmet and heads off to the village. Steven and Vicki explore the cliffs above, witnessed by a monk. The TARDIS is soon after spotted by a Saxon villager, Eldred, who runs to tell the headman of his village, Wulnoth. The Doctor encounters Edith, Wulnoth's wife, and convinces her he is a harmless traveller, while probing for more information. He finds out it is 1066, since Harold Godwinson is on the throne and has not yet faced Harald Hardrada at Stamford Bridge let alone William the Conqueror in the Battle of Hastings. At a nearby monastery, monks are heard chanting. The Doctor finds a gramophone playing the chant, and heads off towards a nearby monastery, where a mysterious monk traps the Doctor in a cell. Steven and Vicki encounter Eldred and notice he has a wristwatch, which the Monk had dropped earlier. They spend the night in a clearing, and the next morning are ambushed by the Saxons and taken to the village council. They convince Wulnoth they are but travellers, and are given provisions to travel on. Vicki is heartened to hear from Edith that the Doctor passed by her hut on his way to the monastery. Steven and Vicki visit the monastery, where the Monk tries to dissuade them from entering but gives himself away by describing the Doctor too accurately. Steven and Vicki decide he must be a prisoner inside. They break in after dark. The Monk sees a Viking ship on the horizon. The Vikings land, and two small groups are sent to search the area. A Viking finds and attacks Edith, and the Saxons go hunting for the invaders. The Vikings are drunk; the giant that attacked Edith is cut down. His companions, Sven and Ulf, flee. Eldred has been badly wounded, and Wulnoth takes him to the monastery for help. While the Monk is occupied with the Saxons, Steven and Vicki find the gramophone. They then leave the monastery via a secret passage. Steven and Vicki have found that the TARDIS has been submerged beneath the incoming tide. They resolve to return to the monastery to look for the Doctor. The Doctor has escaped by the same passage himself, and returns to the Saxon village. He soon hears of the Viking scouting party, and decides to head back to the monastery to track down Steven and Vicki. The Doctor gains the upper hand when the Monk answers the door and believes he is being held at gunpoint. The Monk is being questioned by the Doctor when they are overpowered by Sven and Ulf. In the ensuing confrontation the Monk slips away, leaving the Doctor the Vikings' prisoner. The Doctor knocks out Sven, and elsewhere the Monk does the same to Ulf. The Monk uses his freedom to persuade the villagers to light beacon fires on the cliff tops, telling them that he is expecting materials by sea, when in fact he wishes to lure the Viking fleet to land. Wulnoth agrees to light the fires, but does not do so as he realises the danger. Steven and Vicki return to the monastery via the secret passage and investigate the crypt, where a heavy power cable emanates from a sarcophagus. Looking inside, they discover that it is the Monk's TARDIS, and that he must have come from the same place as the Doctor. The Monk has returned to the monastery and is once more under the Doctor's control. He reveals his plan is to lure the Vikings to the coast and destroy the fleet. This would shore up King Harold to such an extent he would not then lose the Battle of Hastings. The Monk is a Time Meddler. The Doctor denounces the Monk for seeking to alter history, and forces him to reveal his TARDIS, where they find Steven and Vicki. Rejoined, the time travellers piece together the Monk's plot, which the Monk insists is intended to stabilise England and benefit Western civilisation. Ulf and Sven have formed an alliance with the Monk, and have tied up the Doctor's party while the three of them take the neutron bomb shells down to the cannon on the beach. The scheme is foiled, however, when Wulnoth and the Saxons arrive and engage the fleeing Vikings in a nearby clearing, killing Sven and Ulf in battle. The Monk hides while the fighting rages, little knowing that the Doctor and his friends have been freed by Edith and are tampering with his TARDIS. With his scheme in ruins, the Monk decides to leave and returns to his TARDIS, though the Doctor left a note assuring the Monk his meddling days are ended. When the Monk looks inside he realises the Doctor has taken the dimensional control and that the interior of his ship has shrunk beyond use, leaving him stranded in 1066. The tide having gone out, the Doctor and his friends are free to leave. 

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The First Doctor, Vicki and Steven Taylor arrive on an eerily silent planet and encounter curious short and squat non-humanoid robots which resemble three domes stacked on top of each other, and Vicki decides to call the blind, beeping metre-tall machines "Chumbleys" because of what she calls the "chumbley" way they move. The TARDIS crew are still trying to decide whether the Chumbleys are hostile or not when one is disabled by an all-female party of cloned blonde Drahvin warriors from the planet Drahva in Galaxy 4. It is revealed that the unknown planet they are on is also in Galaxy 4 but is not given a name. The Drahvins are dominated by their cruel leader, Maaga, who treats her simple-minded subordinates with bullying contempt. The Drahvins are at war with the reptilian Rills, the masters of the Chumbleys, and both races have crashed spaceships on this planet. The planet will be destroyed in 14 planetary cycles and, with the Drahvin ship irreparable, Maaga and her warriors are keen to capture the Rill ship, which they believe has been made functional again. Maaga paints a picture of the Drahvins as the attacked species in the scenario, but the Doctor has witnessed some of the Drahvin aggression and is clearly not convinced. He also reworks the probability on the planet's destruction and calculates it will break up in just two days' time. The Doctor tries to keep this new finding from the Drahvins, but Maaga reveals her true colours and forces the truth from him at the point of a gun. With Steven held as hostage to ensure their co-operation, the Doctor and Vicki are sent by the Drahvins to try to seize control of the Rill ship. The Doctor works out that the ammonia- breathing Rills are a very advanced species: when he meets one he is impressed, not least by their species' use of telepathy. The huge and impressive, horned warthog-like Rill explains that they have offered to take the Drahvins away with them but Maaga has refused, preferring to maintain a state of war. The Doctor tells the Rills of the true life remaining in the planet and promises to help them escape, since the solar energy converters on the Rill craft have not gathered enough power to effect a lift-off. The Doctor and Vicki return to the Drahvin ship to find Steven unconscious after Maaga has tried to kill him by leaving him in a depressurised airlock. They all return to the Rill vessel, where the Doctor successfully develops a power converter linked to the TARDIS, which charges the Rill craft. Maaga leads the Drahvins in a final assault but the Chumbleys defend their ship long enough for it to power up and leave the planet. One Chumbley left behind to aid the time travellers helps them get back to the TARDIS. Once the ship leaves, the planet explodes, with the Drahvins perishing on the dying world. The story ends with a lead in to "Mission to the Unknown" with Vicki looking at a planet, and wondering what is happening on it. The action then switches to the planet, where Jeff Garvey in a jungle is repeating "I must kill". 

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Boisterous gangster kingpin 'Bull' Weed rehabilitates the down-and-out 'Rolls Royce' Wensel, a former lawyer who has fallen into alcoholism. The two become confidants, with Rolls Royce's intelligence aiding Weed's schemes, but complications arise when Rolls Royce falls for Weed's girlfriend 'Feathers' McCoy. Adding to Weed's troubles are attempts by a rival gangster, 'Buck' Mulligan, to muscle in on his territory. Their antagonism climaxes with Weed killing Mulligan and he is imprisoned, awaiting a death sentence. Rolls Royce devises an escape plan, but he and Feathers face a dilemma, wondering if they should elope together and leave Bull Weed to his fate. 

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Note that the events of Shadows in the Sky, and Swamp of Secrets both take place at the same time, with the exception of the second part of Swamp of Secrets. 

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The play opens with the main characters Lisa and Clint meeting for the first time. Clint has accompanied a friend to Lisa and her mother's mobile home to see Lisa's mother, a prostitute. Clint picks up on Lisa's unease about her mother's situation and begins charming her. The next scene opens a few years later and Clint and Lisa have married and have twins who are being cared for by Clint's mother. The couple has been living in a series of motel rooms and are playing a scam whereby Lisa lures young girls into the room where Clint rapes and abuses them. Afterwards, Lisa murders the girls and disposes of their bodies. Plagued with guilt, Lisa calls the police with anonymous tips on the location of the bodies. Act I concludes with the couple's arrest. Act II deals primarily with the couple's punishments but focuses on Lisa and her motives for her actions. The audience is shown that Lisa has not been able to emotionally mature and that has led her to live the life she has lived. 

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In the beginning of this book, Brad Stanislawski (a bullied, tall, sixth grader) is happy that school is over. When he meets with his mother, he finds out that he must visit his grandfather (a man that he has never met) in Pennsylvania. 

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Central to this book is the tension created by Ayla's healing art, her pregnancy, and the acceptance of her by Jondalar's people, the Zelandonii. Ayla was raised by Clan Neanderthals, known as "flatheads" to the Zelandonii and viewed as no better than animals. For the Zelandonii to accept Ayla they must first overcome their prejudice against the Neanderthals. Luckily for Ayla and Jondalar, some of the higher-ranking Zelandonii already have doubts of this misjudgment. Two of their number, Echozar and Brukeval, are of partial Neanderthal ancestry and are ashamed of it. Echozar at least is pacified by Ayla's own story and by his (Echozar's) own marriage to Joplaya, Jondalar's close-cousin (half-sister). Brukeval, on the other hand, rejects his heritage utterly and refuses to listen to reason. Jondalar's first romantic interest, Zelandoni, formerly known as Zolena, has now become the First among the spiritual leaders. She supports adopting Ayla into their society, if not least for the healing arts she brings to the cave, although Ayla also must overcome the feeling that she is uncomfortable with a full connection with the spirit world. After Ayla helps a mortally injured hunter live long enough to see his mate, the First senses that Ayla needs to be brought into the fold of the Zelandonia (mystics, named after their culture so as to identify themselves with it) so that she will be accepted as a healer by all the people of the cave. At one point, Ayla persuades the native mothers to nurse a neglected infant, on the pretext that even a "flathead" would have done so in their place. This both shames them into agreeing (as noted by Jondalar's sister-in- law, Proleva) and educates the Zelandonii in the ways of their ex-neighbors. Ayla is drawn ever closer to an as-yet-undetermined role in the Ninth Cave of the Zelandonii. Her knowledge of the healing arts as well as hunting force her to accept a role in the spiritual leadership of the group. Through it all Jondalar is waiting for the summer meeting and matrimonial that will finally "tie the knot" for the two of them. This has been his ultimate goal since The Valley of Horses. Their daughter, Jonayla, named for her mother's belief a man's "essence" creates babies, which leads to Jondalar and Ayla each being part of the baby, not just their spirits, is born sometime after this event. Not long after the birth, Ayla finally decides to become Zelandoni's acolyte, if only so that the members of the Zelandonii will accept her as a healer. This book is set in what is now the Vézère valley, near to Les Eyzies, in the Dordogne, southwest France. It was relatively densely populated in prehistoric times, with many open cliff-top dwellings that can still be seen, some of which have been turned into tourist attractions. The national museum of prehistory is located in this valley. Ayla also discovers the world-famous cave of Lascaux, which her adopted people subsequently paint. 

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The protagonist of this novel, Anthony Greville, is a Member of Parliament who is married with two children. His son Adam is seventeen and his daughter Sophie is eight. Despite the outward perfection of his life, Greville is having an affair with sculptor Natalia Jones, an enigmatic mother of two who is married to a husband in politics who cheats on her. Greville's wife is away at the family's country retreat for weeks on end and his children at their respective schools, so Greville enjoys his lover's company with minimal risk of being discovered. However, as smitten with Natalia as Greville is, he has a brief fling with a woman named Madeleine, as well. In spite of his easy lifestyle, Greville is not a happy man. The focus of this novel is based on Greville's dissatisfactions and confusions. For instance, although Natalia does not make any demands on him, and his wife prefers not to see what is going on, Greville is torn between the two women. He wants to be with Natalia when he is with his wife and vice versa. What is more, he sees two people in his lover. To Anthony Greville, Natalia is an angelic figure who also symbolizes a diametrical opposite, specifically demonic. This dual perception of his lover leads him call her by two different names (Natalie and Natalia). Greville becomes disillusioned with politics, because he feels that political gaming prefers stalemate to partisanship,and therefore, opposes real change. Subsequently, Greville states that he is going to resign from Parliament as soon as possible. This is a startling announcement because Greville comes from a family of politicians, and his son is already active in grassroots politics. However, before his intended resignation, he must complete a final diplomatic mission as an MP; he journeys to Central Africa to meet Ndoula, a controversial freedom fighter who has been imprisoned by the colonial powers. While he is in Africa, without the emotional chaos of his personal life, Greville begins to introspect, writing and trying to make sense of his life. When Greville returns to England, he finds that both his wife and his idealistic son are leaving for Africa in order to help the current crisis. Greville sees them off at the airport, and then returns to Natalia, even though she has not answered his letters from abroad. Although interesting and similar in content and intent to the works of Graham Greene, the plot line of Natalie Natalia can be construed as "difficult to follow" because the linear narration is interrupted by segments where Greville's thoughts, dreams, and fantasies become the focus of the prose. An example of such an interruptive/introspective segment in Greville's POV (from Chapter 7) follows : > […] I had rowed into the harbour from the sea; the oars had made whirlpools. > A light appeared in the window: your breast, above the candle, burned. We > wrapped our cloaks round us: ran with our shoulders against the drawbridge. > Hands came through the door and held us; they were tendrils through the > stone. You watched from an upstairs window. We were in the hallway of the > castle. You stood with the candle and one hand against your breast. The > candle burned: it made blood against the snow. The man with the beak of a > bird put his head down to embrace you: with one arm round his neck, you were > a tunnel through which he could breathe. On the stairs were figures in suits > of armour. Firelight flickered. You were laid on a table with one leg > raised. The man with the mask of a bird rummaged inside you. He was looking > in you like a suitcase. I had been in the cell all winter alone. Turning you > on your front, you had been split up the back by an axe. Men in white coats > stood around you. They had instruments in their hands with which to handle > coals. They flipped them over. You had your face to the wall and were > fastened to iron rings. The man with the beak of a bird tore the lining. > Hands had come through the wall and held me. Your arms were round the neck > of the man with the mask like a swan. He reached to the entrails and the > liver. Men leaned over tables and shovelled coal. Their pink cheeks glowed. > You stood with a hand at your breast and the candle burning you. On the > stairs were men in armour; their swords flickered. With your back towards > them, they heated irons in the coal. They lifted your leg up and put it on > the table. Moving with my hands behind me, I felt an iron ring in the stone. > If I pulled, there would be a tunnel: I could put an iron bar across the > hole. At the end of it would be a cell. There I had been all winter. […] 

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Insurer Charles Desvallées lives in a beautiful house in the countryside near Paris with his wife Hélène and their young son. He works in the city in a leisurely job, often drinking and smoking. His wife often goes to Paris for shopping, beauty treatments and cinema sessions. By accident he discovers she was not at the hairdresser when she was meant to be. He gradually grows more suspicious about the way she employs her time and asks a private investigator to follow her. The embarrassed detective duly reports that his wife sees a writer called Victor Pégala, at his home in Neuilly-sur-Seine, several times a week. Hélène appears in bed with Pégala, exchanging titbits about their respective lives. The writer is divorced with two children. On a day his wife is busy hosting a birthday party for their son, Desvallées pays Pégala a visit. At first he tells the confused writer jovially that he and his wife have an open marriage and sits and talks pleasantly with him. He asks for a tour of the small flat. On seeing the bed his demeanour changes, as he pictures his wife there. He spots a giant cigarette lighter at the bedside. This had been a 3rd anniversary present to his wife from him. He starts to feel unwell and suddenly grabs a stone bust and kills Pégala with a violent blow to the head. Desvallée calms down and meticulously cleans up and removes all fingerprints. He then brings his car round near the back gate, bundles up the body, and drags it in broad daylight but in a quiet neighbourhood to the car, where he stuffs it in the boot. En route he is rear-ended by a van after braking distractedly. Desvallée nearly panics and hurries the formalities with the other driver as a crowd assembles and a policeman remarks that his boot is now jammed. He dumps the body into a murky pond where it takes an agonisingly long time to sink. A day or two later, Hélène is grumpy and unwell. Two detectives turn up in the daytime to interrogate her about Victor Pégala, who has been reported missing by his ex-wife. They have found her name and details in the missing man's address book. She is flustered and avoids giving direct answers as to how she knew Victor. In the evening, she mentions the disappearance to her husband, claiming Pégala was only a vague acquaintance. The detectives return and interrogate both Hélène and Charles, who denies having even heard of the man before. Hélène finds a photograph of Victor in her husband's jacket pocket with his name and address on the back. She looks as if she is going to confront him but she goes outside and burns it. Her emotions are difficult to read. In the final scene the family is in their garden when the two policemen walk up the drive. Charles tells Hélène that he "loves her madly" and goes to speak to the police. The camera then moves back to the wife and child, slowly panning until they disappear hidden by soft focus foliage as Charles is presumably taken away from them. 

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Takeshi Kovacs finds himself in a new "sleeve," or human body, back on his home planet of Harlan's World. He is on the run after making numerous attacks against the Knights of the New Revelation, an extremist religious order responsible for the death of his lost love and her daughter. Because she had violated tenets about resleeving, her executioners dropped her and her daughter's cortical stacks in the sea, effectively preventing them from being resleeved (into new bodies). While trying to secure passage after his most recent attack, Kovacs saves a woman named Sylvie from a group of religious zealots. In return, she allows him to take refuge with her mercenary "deCom" crew as they head out to decommission sentient military hardware that has run amok on the island of New Hokkaido (AKA New Hok). Sylvie is the "command head" of her crew, co-ordinating them during missions by using her biologically implanted circuitry and software. During one of these missions, Sylvie collapses, regains consciousness, and Kovacs realizes that her personality seems to have been replaced by that of long-dead revolutionary leader Quellcrist Falconer. Harlan's World is surrounded by automated "orbitals" which target flying objects, such as vehicles, with high-energy beam weapons known as "angelfire;" Falconer is believed to have died without a backup of her cortical stack when her getaway aircraft was destroyed by angelfire 300 years prior. When Sylvie's crew returns from New Hok, they discover a younger version of Kovacs has been illegally duplicated into a different body (AKA "double sleeved") and is hunting them on behalf of the Harlan family that rules the planet. Most of Sylvie's crew is killed and Sylvie/Quellcrist is captured. Kovacs schemes to rescue Sylvie by approaching old criminal associates of his, the Little Blue Bugs. The Little Blue Bugs mount a semi- successful attack on a Harlan fortress and rescue Sylvie/Quellcrist. Hiding from Harlan forces in a floating base, the neo-Quellists are sold out by its owner and recaptured. An assault by Kovacs and a single UN Envoy on the base ends badly when Kovacs is betrayed by the Envoy who was actually embedded with several colleagues. However, Sylvie/Quellcrist has established a connection with the orbitals and calls down angelfire, eliminating their captors. The younger Kovacs is killed in the aftermath. Sylvie explains that angelfire is a destructive recording device. Thus, in destroying Quellcrist and the helicopter carrying her, it copied her. When the technology of the deCom crews advanced far enough, her persona was able to insert itself into Sylvie's implants and co-exist in her body. The novel ends with Kovacs, Virginia Vidaura, and Sylvie/Quellcrist waiting to see if they can use Sylvie/Quellcrist's newfound connection to the orbitals and the expansion of a long-dormant genetic virus to turn the population against the ruling oligarchy. 

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The film is set in the 17th century during the Swedish invasion of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the years 1655 to 1658, known as The Deluge, which was eventually thwarted by the Polish-Lithuanian forces. However, a quarter of the Polish-Lithuanian population died through war and plague, and the country's economy was devastated.A Commonwealth of Diverse Cultures - Poland's Heritage 

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A major thunderstorm hits Springfield, and Marge demands that Homer fix their leaking roof. Homer attempts to solve the problem by using Hot Wheels ramps to transport all the draining water from the roof to the front yard through the hallway, the stairway and the mail slot on the front door. Though this plan seems to work well, Lisa's hamster slides down the ramps to the front yard by accident. Shocked, Lisa opens the front door to save her hamster, breaking all the ramps, and leaving the house all wet. Marge berates Homer for not providing a more sensible solution to fix the roof. Angered, Homer decides to go to Moe's Tavern, but is kicked out when he sits on Lenny's birthday cake by accident, shaped in the form of Lenny's favourite bar stool. Feeling depressed, Homer finds another bar, "Knockers" (A parody of the restaurant Hooters), where he meets a friendly man named Ray Magini. The two talk, and Homer finds out that Ray is a roofer, so Homer asks him to fix his leak. Ray agrees. The next day, Homer assures Marge that his new friend will be taking care of the roof. Ray, however, does not arrive until everyone else has left. The two of them get up on the roof and use nail guns to nail the boards onto the roof, but they start shooting nails at each other, some hitting Ned Flanders' lawn mower next door. Ray leaves later and, as Homer runs on the roof, he crashes through the small part of the roof that they fixed, making the hole bigger. Meanwhile, Marge and the kids leave Santa's Little Helper with Grampa and the Springfield Retirement Home residents, because they seem to like him. When Marge sees the hole, she tells Homer to fix it himself, because she sees no reason to believe that his friend will. The next day, Bart and Homer go to the Builder's Barn, and Homer meets Ray there. Ray apologizes to Homer for having not finished the job and promises he will stop by soon to work on the roof. Lisa, Marge, and Maggie arrive back at the retirement home, only to discover that Santa's Little Helper has become one of the old people. They permanently take him back home. After waiting a long while for Ray to show on the roof, Marge becomes worried about Homer, and tells him that Ray is just a figment of his imagination. When Homer refuses to believe it, he falls off the roof and is knocked unconscious. Marge then takes Homer to the Calmwood Mental Hospital. Dr. Hibbert tells him that Ray does not exist; he was created by Homer's mind as Homer was feeling lonely and unappreciated because of the previous events he had endured. All the people that Homer thinks saw Ray - Bart, Ned, and the "Knockers" bartender - claim they did not, and Lisa reveals that "Ray Magini" is an anagram for "imaginary". Six weeks and several hours of shock therapy later, Homer is now sure that Ray does not exist. As he is being discharged, he sees Ray again in the room. Angered by the pain the "figment of his imagination" has caused him, he assaults him. In retaliation, Ray knocks Homer out and everyone is surprised they can see him too. He did really exist the whole time: the bartender did not see Ray as he had an eye patch on (while looking in the direction of Homer and Ray that night, Ray was before his covered eye), and Ray could not be seen by Ned because he was behind the chimney. Bart still viewed Homer with skepticism for talking to thin air, but Stephen Hawking arrives and says that Bart could not see Ray at the hardware store because of a miniature black hole caused directly behind Ray which absorbed the light from Ray and made it look as though Homer was talking to himself when Homer was actually talking to Ray. Marge asks Ray why he started fixing the roof, and then just disappeared. Ray says he is a contractor. Everyone laughs, and Marge says "That's right, you're all crooks!" Hibbert, seeing how angry Homer is as he was made to go through shock treatment for nothing, offers to make it up to him by doing a free eye scraping for him. Homer agrees on it, but also forces Hibbert to fix the roof without any breaks while Ray and Homer discuss Everybody Loves Raymond on the roof. 

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Principal Skinner is looking for a company to sign a vending machine contract with Springfield Elementary, with half of the machine's profits going to the school. He looks at suggestions of a gumbo machine from the Sea Captain that seriously burned the Sea Captain's hand and a request box from Gil and rejects them, until he gets a suggestion from Lindsey Naegle. The unhealthy vending machines sponsored by hip-hop artists are installed, and most of the students use the machines (save for Lisa, who protests their extremely high sugar content and artificial additives), but Bart is seen using it the most frequently. Due to the high fat and sugar content in the snacks, and due to the high frequency of their consumption, three weeks later, Bart significantly gains weight and becomes obese, and during an in-show parody of the opening credits, he suffers a heart attack after slowly trying to make it home from school. Bart sees Dr. Hibbert, who says that malted milk balls have clogged his arteries, and that a wad of Laffy Taffy is blocking his liver. He informs the family that Bart is addicted to junk food and tells Marge to put him on a diet. However, Lisa discovers that Bart has been hiding junk food in his walls, and the family stages an intervention. When Bart tries to run away, due to his widened and obese frame, he gets stuck in a fence and is caught by two representatives of a maximum security fat camp, Serenity Ranch. Bart ends up there with Apu, Rainier Wolfcastle (who was last seen fattening up for a movie), and Kent Brockman, and the camp's leader is none other than former junk food magnate Tab Spangler (who is dealing with many anger issues). However, when Bart is there, the family is faced with an expensive bill. To pay for the camp, the family converts their house into a youth hostel, which attracts German tourists. At the fat camp, Bart cheats by sneaking food, so Tab Spangler takes him home to visit the family to show him the horrors that occur. His family is working continually to appease the students staying in their home. The Germans humiliate the family, making Homer dance for change and forcing Marge and Lisa to clean intentional messes while pointing out America's problems one by one. He suggests Bart fight his addiction, and he does, by destroying the vending machines in school. His addiction to junk food is over, and he steals the money from the vending machines, which the family uses to pay for the bill and give the Germans "Das Boot". Homer gets revenge by beating up the Germans, and tossing them out. Tab Spangler says that Bart still has three weeks left of non-refundable treatment, and Homer goes with Tab (by force from the family), where the episode ends with them driving in Tab's car arguing over the cheeseburger Homer is eating. 

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The story is set in Ukrainian lands of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland during the Khmelnytsky Uprising of the mid-17th century. A Polish noble, Skrzetuski, and a Cossack otaman Bohun, both fall in love with the same woman, Helena. Their rivalry unfolds against the backdrop of a Cossack uprising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky, aimed at reclaiming control of the land from the hands of the Polish nobles. Historic events form a framework for an action and character driven plot, and fictional characters mingle with historic ones. The movie, as the book, culminates with the savage siege of Zbarazh. 

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The first two books take place somewhere in the primeval forests of Europe near a huge volcano. Fire glows on its summit and sometimes burning lava pours down the slopes, destroying everything in its path. For countless ages, primitive man has worshipped the fire-god in dumb terror. But at last comes the first great moment in the history of mankind: the emergence from the herd of a man with a mind and a will, a Prometheus. Fearlessly confronting the unknown, he solves the riddle of fire and brings it down on a torch to serve man. With it he lights campfires to keep off wild beasts. But he does much more. Observing the movements of the stars he infers the notion of time, the first abstract idea won from the darkness of chaos. He also takes the first step toward civilized intercourse between individuals, discovering tenderness in sexual relations, the inaugural burgeoning of what we know as love. In the end he dies a prophet's death at the hands of the obtuse masses, but he bequeathes a rich legacy to posterity. The next two books, with a second prehistoric patriarch, begins after another measureless lapse of time. The world has changed now, the volcano is extinct, the climate cooling. There is a general migration to the south. But one man sets off in the opposite direction to grapple with hardship. He is a sort of Cain, a slayer avoided by his fellow men, whom he holds in such contempt that he does not even condescend to take their god, fire, with him to the icy lands of the North. Defying the cold, he grows hardy and strong. With a woman who has somehow found her way up there he becomes the father of the Nordic race which is so dear to Jensen, who follows its destiny. He rediscovers fire, not simply borrowing it as before but by a stroke of genius striking it out of two minerals. And thus he founds a new civilization. The theme is repeated in the third and fourth book with another genius who invents means of locomotion: wagons and boats driven by oar or sail. The men of the North, ready now to listen to the old call to the summer lands, begin the long journey proper. The later books describing the journey take us down to historical times: we see the Cimbrians marching on Rome and the Vikings' raids. But the story does not end until Columbus realizes that dream of a tropical paradise which is the leading idea of the book. 

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In 1854, Edward Pierce, a charismatic and affluent "cracksman" or master thief, makes plans to steal a shipment of gold worth more than twelve thousand pounds being transported monthly from London to the Crimean War front. He faces enormous obstacles as the bank has taken strict precautions, including locking the gold in two custom-built safes, each with two locks, thus requiring a total of four keys to open. He recruits Robert Agar, a "screwsman" or specialist in copying keys, as an accomplice. To ensure his plan's success, Pierce spends more than a year in preparation. His first steps are fairly easy as he uses his wealth and social contacts to procure information on the security measures and locations of the keys. The bank's president, Edgar Trent, and its general manager, Henry Fowler, each possess a key. The other two are locked in a cabinet at the offices of the South Eastern Railway at the London Bridge terminus. Pierce's first target is Edgar Trent's key, but he has no clues or prior information on Trent's habits. Through painstaking surveillance, conversations with bank employees and a deliberately bungled pickpocketing attempt, Pierce deduces that Trent's key is kept at his mansion, but is still unable to learn the exact location. After learning that Trent is keen on ratting (a blood sport involving the betting on dogs killing rats,) Pierce succeeds in becoming acquainted with Trent and while visiting the Trent mansion feigns a romantic interest in Elizabeth Trent, Trent's plain twenty-nine-year-old daughter, who has had few suitors. While pretending to court Elizabeth, Pierce learns that the key is most likely located in the basement wine cellar. With the assistance of his longtime mistress, known only as "Miss Miriam" (who is also an actress,) and his loyal associate, a buck cabby named Barlow, Pierce and Agar successfully break into Trent's home and wine cellar by night and make a wax impression of the key. Henry Fowler contracts syphilis and, too embarrassed to seek medical attention, asks his friend Pierce, as a bachelor and sporting gentleman, to aid him in seeking a remedy: sleeping with a virgin. After supposedly making the necessary arrangements through a madam (actually "Miss Miriam") and charging Fowler the exorbitant price of one hundred fifty guineas for a night-time assignation with a twelve-year-old (the legal age of consent) "fresh," Pierce and Agar are able to make an impression of Fowler's key, which he always carries with him around his neck but takes off and leaves with his clothes (at the request of his virgin) during the assignation. The most difficult keys to "wax" are the two keys at the train station. Pierce plans to copy them at night, but the presence of "crushers" (policemen) and "jacks" (security guards) forces him to recruit "Clean Willy" Williams, a "snakesman" or burglar able to slip inside buildings through small and cramped openings, who is currently incarcerated in the high-security and supposedly escape-proof Newgate Prison. Pierce sends a message through Willy's former mistress and assists Willy in escaping from Newgate while the public is distracted by a public execution outside the prison. After nursing Willy back to health from injuries received during the escape, the criminals succeed in making wax copies of the two keys at the railway station, completing the job with only seconds to spare before detection. Now possessing copies of all four keys, Pierce bribes Burgess, the poorly paid train guard who rides in the baggage van containing the safes. Agar is then able to perform a dry run of the theft on 17 February 1855, making sure that the copied keys work perfectly. Certain unexpected events over the next few months cause delays. Finally the actual robbery is scheduled for May 22nd, but Pierce's plans are again disrupted when "Clean Willy" suddenly turns "nose" (police informer). Pierce's cabby Barlow murders Willy before he can reveal the most crucial information, although Willy has told enough to cause Edward Harranby, a very senior Scotland Yard detective, to deduce that a major robbery is planned. Through careful manipulation of a "blower" (informant) Pierce diverts the police's attention to an alleged robbery of the transatlantic cable company's payroll in Greenwich, leaving the thieves free and clear to finally strike. On the eve of the Great Train Robbery, another unexpected development occurs: a new railway policy requires the baggage van doors to be locked from the outside and prohibits anyone except the guard from riding in the baggage van. Determined not to further delay the theft, Pierce smuggles Agar into the baggage van inside a coffin, then risks his life by climbing across the roof of the train during the journey. He unlocks the door from outside, thus allowing them to drop off the gold at a pre-arranged point. By the next day, much of England is in an uproar upon the discovery of the robbery, with every organisation involved in the gold shipment blaming each other, few leads as to the true culprits and no idea how it was done. The members of the gang drop out of sight. Eighteen months later, Agar's mistress, who has been caught in the act of robbing a drunk, informs on Agar to escape imprisonment. Agar, who has been arrested on an unrelated charge, turns "nose" after being threatened by Harranby with transportation to Australia. Pierce and Burgess are arrested at a prize- fighting event in Manchester, and all three are ultimately convicted. Pierce is sentenced to a long prison term, but escapes while being transported from court (presumably arranged by Miss Miriam and Barlow) and disappears. After Pierce's escape, conflicting reports indicate him, Miriam and Barlow spending the rest of their lives living in luxury, reportedly in various foreign cities. Burgess dies of cholera during his short prison term; Agar is transported to Australia, but prospers and passes away a wealthy man in 1902. Edgar Trent dies from a chest ailment in 1857, while Henry Fowler dies from "unknown causes" in 1858. Edward Harranby dies in 1879 after being kicked in the head by a horse he had been flogging. The final line of the novel reads, "The money from the Great Train Robbery was never recovered." 

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Fiona Belli is an 18-year-old girl who recently moved to college. While visiting her parents, she is involved in a car accident, and awakens in a cage in the dungeon of a castle. Her memories of the incident are hazy. Noting that the cage that keeps her prisoner has been left unlocked, she steps out and begins searching for answers and a way out of the castle. Soon after, she befriends a White Shepherd named Hewie. As Fiona begins to unravel the mystery in which she finds herself, she learns that she is the carrier of the Azoth, an alchemic element, which for unknown reasons is being sought by Riccardo, the castle's keeper. The first enemy Fiona encounters is Debilitas, a large, mentally disabled groundskeeper who thinks of Fiona as one of his dolls. Fiona learns from a mysterious man named Lorenzo, that to escape the castle, she needs a staff from the chapel. However, upon taking the staff, Debilitas corners Fiona and Hewie, forcing a confrontation. They defeat Debilitas, but soon find their next enemy, Daniella, an icy maid. Daniella covets Fiona's ability to smell, taste, touch, feel, and "experience pleasure." She is especially jealous that Fiona can create life (via a fertile womb). Daniella is defeated when she is impaled with a shard from a ceiling window pane. The third villain is Riccardo, who wields a flintlock pistol. For the majority of the game, Riccardo keeps his face hidden under a hood. Upon revealing himself however, Fiona is shocked to see her dead father's face. Riccardo reveals that he and her father, Ugo, are clones. He murdered Ugo in the car accident as revenge for leaving the castle and marrying Fiona's mother. He plans to use Fiona (by means of her womb and use of her Azoth) to bring about his own rebirth, so that he may live forever. As they fight atop a water tower, Hewie rescues Fiona by attacking Riccardo, causing him to fall from the summit. The final enemy is Lorenzo, who seemed to be an ally, but who now menaces Fiona in several different forms. Fiona first meets him as an old, crippled man. He tells Fiona that Riccardo was always the problem child, and that he created both Riccardo and Ugo in an attempt to find a body with an Azoth which he could use to gain immortality. Ugo had the Azoth, but left the castle to marry Ayla. Now with Riccardo dead, Lorenzo believes that Fiona is his, so he can take the Azoth she inherited from her father. He chases after Fiona, but she is able to crush him in a rock press. However, she soon encounters a resurrected, youthful Lorenzo; the life energy he acquired from Riccardo's body has allowed him mastery over his own aging process. With the help of Hewie, Fiona causes Lorenzo to fall into a pit of lava. At this point, the castle begins to shake and collapse, and Lorenzo returns as a flaming skeleton. He chases Fiona as she heads for the exit, and attempts to block her escape, but as they reach the door, he finally dies, and Fiona and Hewie leave the castle. 

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In Ravenna, Italy, Giuliana is walking with her young son, Valerio, towards the petrochemical plant managed by her husband, Ugo. Passing workers who are on strike, Giuliana nervously and impulsively purchases a half-eaten sandwich from one of the workers. They are surrounded by strange industrial structures and debris that create inhuman images and sounds. Inside the plant, Ugo is talking with a visiting business associate, Corrado Zeller, who is looking to recruit workers for an industrial operation in Patagonia, Argentina. Ugo and Corrado converse comfortably in the noisy factory. Ugo tells Corrado that his wife, Giuliana, had a recent auto accident, and though she was physically unhurt, she has not been right mentally. That night in their apartment, Giuliana becomes highly agitated and fearful over a dream she had about sinking in quicksand. Ugo is unable to calm her or understand what she's experiencing. Attracted to Giuliana, Corrado visits her at an empty shop she's planning to open and talks about his life and the restless nature of his existence. She accompanies him to Ferrara on one of his worker recruitment drives, and she indirectly reveals details about her mental state. She tells him that when she was in the hospital, she met a young woman patient who was advised by her doctors to find someone or something to love—a husband, a son, a job, even a dog. She speaks of the young woman feeling like there was "no ground beneath her, like she was sliding down a slope, sinking, always on the verge of drowning." They travel to a radio observatory in Medicina, where Corrado hopes to recruit a top worker. Surrounded by cold industrial architecture, Giuliana seems lost in her loneliness and isolation. The following weekend, Giuliana, Ugo, and Corrado are walking beside a polluted estuary where they meet up with another couple, Max and Linda, and together they drive to a small riverside shack at Porto Corsini where they meet Emilia. They spend time in the shack engaged in trivial small talk filled with jokes, role-playing, and sexual innuendo. Giuliana seems to find temporary solace in these mindless distractions. A mysterious ship docks directly outside their shack, and as she looks out to the open sea, Giuliana confides to Corrado, "I can't look at the sea for long or I lose interest in what's happening on land." During their conversations, Corrado and Giuliana have grown closer, and he shows interest and sympathy for her. Like Giuliana, Corrado is also alienated, but he is better adapted to and accepting of his environment, telling her, "You wonder what to look at; I wonder how to live." When a doctor arrives to board the ship, Giuliana, seeing that the ship is now quarantined due to an infectious disease, rushes off in a state of panic. Her unwillingness to stay, or to return to the shack to retrieve the purse she left behind, underscores her state of alienation from the others. Sometime later, Ugo leaves on a business trip, and Giuliana spends more time with Corrado, revealing more about her anxieties. One day she discovers that her son has apparently become suddenly paralyzed from the waist down. Fearing he has contracted polio, Giuliana tries to comfort her son with a story about a young girl who lives on an island and swims off a beach at an isolated cove. The girl is at home with her surroundings, but after a mysterious sailing ship approaches offshore, all the rocks of the cove seem to come alive and sing to her in one voice. Soon after, Giuliana discovers to her shock that Valerio was only pretending to be paralyzed. Unable to imagine why her son would do such a cruel thing, Guiliana's sense of loneliness and isolation returns. Desperate to end her inner turmoil, Giuliana goes to Corrado's apartment where he tries to force his affections on her. Initially resisting Corrado's advances, Giuliana eventually accepts his affections, and the two make love in his bed. The intimacy, however, does little to relieve Giuliana's sense of isolation. The next day, a distraught Giuliana leaves Corrado and wanders to a dockside ship where she meets a foreign sailor and tries to communicate her feelings to him, but he cannot understand her words. Acknowledging the reality of her isolation, she says, "We are all separate." At that point, Giuliana seems to be completely alone and at her lowest state. Sometime later, Giuliana is again walking with her son near her husband's plant. Valerio notices a nearby smokestack emitting poisonous yellow smoke and wonders if birds are being killed by the toxic emissions. Giuliana tells him that the birds have learned not to fly near the poisonous yellow smoke. 

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Grimm, dressed as a clown, robs a bank in midtown Manhattan. He sets up an ingenious hostage situation and successfully gets away with $1 million and his accomplices: girlfriend Phyllis and best friend Loomis. The heist itself is comparatively straightforward and easy, but the getaway turns into a nightmare. The relatively simple act of getting to the airport to catch a flight out of the country is complicated by the fact that fate, luck and all of New York City appears to be conspiring against their escape. To begin with, the trio is seeking the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway to get to the airport, but the signs were removed during construction work, resulting in the three robbers becoming lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood in Brooklyn. Then, a conman/thief robs the trio of everything they have (except the bank money, which they have taped under their clothes). After changing into new clothes at Phyllis' apartment, they are confronted and nearly gunned down by the paranoid and stressed-out incoming tenant. At the same time, a fire has broken out across the street and the fire department arrives and pushes their car away from a hydrant only to cause it to roll downhill and then down an embankment. When the three crooks eventually manage to flag down a cab, the foreign driver is hopelessly non-fluent in English. This causes a hysterical Loomis to jump out of the moving cab to grab another, but he runs into a newsstand, knocking himself unconscious. The driver leaves, thinking he's killed Loomis. An anal-retentive bus driver, a run-in with mobsters and Phyllis' increasing desperation to tell Grimm the news that she is pregnant with his child add further complications. All the while, Rotzinger, a world-weary but relentless chief of the New York City Police Department, is doggedly attempting to nab the fleeing trio. A meeting on board an airliner at the airport occurs between the robbers and the chief, who gets the added prize of having a major crime boss dropped in his lap with their assistance. Unfortunately the chief only realizes who they were after their plane has taken off. 

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The story takes place in Provencal France, where a group of young boys ("mistons" roughly translates "brats") are infatuated with a beautiful young woman. Jealous of her passionate affair, they conspire to make mischief for the woman and her boyfriend. 

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Matty Dean, a young gay man, arrives in New York City and heads for Greenwich Village. He falls in with crossdressing sex worker La Miranda and friends, who take him to Stonewall Inn. There is a police raid and Matty and La Miranda are arrested. They are bailed out by Bostonia, the African-American "mother" of the queens who hang out at Stonewall, and the secret lover of Vinnie, the deeply closeted mafioso who runs Stonewall. Matty and La Miranda go back to her place where she receives her draft notice. Matty attends a meeting of the Mattachine Society, where he meets Burt and Ethan. The group is planning a picket at Independence Hall in Philadelphia. Ethan and Matty witness an initiation of sorts as a young man named José becomes the persona Camelia. After the ceremony they return to La Miranda's place and have sex. Matty spends time with Ethan, who is a writer under a pseudonym for a homophile magazine. La Miranda reports to the induction center in full drag and is ordered to go for psychological evaluation. La Miranda is terrified because of former bad experiences with psychiatrists, so Matty dons her clothes and meets with the doctor in her place, securing a rejection from military service for her as a "sexual deviant." On the subway ride home, Matty tells La Miranda he loves her. At a Mattachine meeting, Matty is disgusted by the guest speaker, a psychiatrist who discourses on the then-current disease model of homosexuality, and leaves. After the meeting Burt, Ethan and Matty argue about it on their way to meet with a reporter and photographer from the Village Voice newspaper. The group stages a "sip-in," trying to illustrate discriminatory alcohol service laws by being refused service but no one refuses to serve them until they go to Stonewall. At the bar La Miranda and Ethan meet and Ethan treats her mockingly. La Miranda realizes that Matty hasn't told his Mattachine friends about her and storms out. Matty follows and they argue about La Miranda's refusal to conform and Matty's feeling the need to be with more masculine men. Matty seeks out Ethan and they begin an affair. Vinnie points out a clinic he calls the "Palace of Dreams" and tells Bostonia that he wants her to have sex reassignment surgery so that they can marry, but she is opposed to the idea. Following the Philadelphia picket, Ethan takes Matty to Fire Island. Given the choice between Ethan's acceptance of discrimination and La Miranda's defiance, Matty chooses La Miranda and they reconcile. It is the day of Judy Garland's death. Bostonia watches the television coverage. To cheer her up, Vinnie takes her out in full drag in public for the first time. They have ice cream at a fancy restaurant, their open affection drawing disapproving stares and are asked to leave by the manager. As they wake up together the next morning, Vinnie asks Bostonia if he's ever told her that he loves her. She says no. Vinnie suddenly commits suicide with a bullet through the head and Bostonia becomes hysterical. Vinnie has left her a large amount of cash and scrawled "I LOVE YOU" on a mirror in lipstick. That night at Stonewall there's another raid. Several of the queens are arrested, including Bostonia. She smashes a police officer in the face and is attacked by other cops. When other queens fight back, touching off the riots that would mark the beginning of the gay community's militant advocacy movement for its rights. 

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Arjun Singh (Amitabh Bachchan) and Pyare Mohan (Govinda) are police inspectors. They share a friendly bond. Arjun's sister, Seema (Raveena Tandon), is in love with Pyare. Arjun has no female companion and some petty comments are made about his age. Zorawar (Paresh Rawal) runs a business smuggling arms and diamonds, under a cover of being a statue maker. Once, in a hotel, he discovers that he is being spied upon and along with the cop spying on him, he gets rid of Madhu (Divya Dutta), an eyewitness. Madhu's friend, Neha (Ramya Krishnan), witnesses Madhu's murder. Scared, and with the gangsters after her, she calls the police station and asks for Pyare, but since he is not there, Arjun is asked to go to her, and masquerade as Pyare, who had been described as a very good person to Neha by her dead friend. In a considerable amount of confusion, he takes her to Pyare's house and even ges to the extent of asking Pyare to masquerade as Arjun. Two petty thieves, Bade Miyan (Amitabh Bachchan) and Chote Miyan (Govinda), who are look-alikes of Arjun and Pyare respectively, arrive in town. Confusion ensue when every crime the crooks commit are blamed on Arjun and Pyare. Things goes further downhill when Shyamlal (Anupam Kher), the police commissioner, is also thrashed by the doubles. Arjun and Pyare are blamed for stealing a diamond from a bank and messing up security operation of Madhuri Dixit (herself). Even Seema and Neha mistake Bade and Chote for Arjun and Pyare. Arjun and Pyare further land in trouble when Zorawar kidnaps Seema and asks for the diamond and Neha in return. Arjun and Pyare, who have been arrested, are saved by the arrival of Bade and Chote, who confuse their acts of theft and conning, and promise to get Neha and Seema back. Bade and Chote arrive at Zorawar's hideout and stall them while Arjun and Pyare come with police force and everyone at the hideout is arrested. The crooks leave after apologising to Neha and Seema for the confusion. However, some of Zorawar's men hijack the police van which is taking Zorawar and his associates to jail. They are stopped on the way by Bade and Chote, asking for a lift. The latter realises who really are in the van and proceed to badly thrash Zorawar and his men and return him to jail. Arjun and Pyare are criticised for their mistake regarding the hijacking of the van and the two crooks are given a job in the police force by the commissioner himself. The film ends with Arjun and Pyare ending up being demoted to the post of traffic police officers and Bade and Chote taking their place as police inspectors. 

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The player assumes the role of Marîd Audran, a private detective. The game is set in "The Budayeen", an entertainment/criminal quarter in an unnamed city somewhere in the Middle East that is based on New Orleans. While running a series of errands/"business deals" for "Saied the Half-Hajj", a friend of Marîd's, Marîd is framed for the murder of a man named Kenji Carter. Although Marîd's influential patron Friedlander Bey clears him with the local police, Bey asks him to look into Carter's death. Doing so leads Marîd deep into the criminal underworld of the Budayeen. 

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Ellen Arden (Monroe), a photographer and mother of two small children, has been declared legally dead, having been lost at sea in the Pacific. Her husband Nick (Dean Martin) has remarried; he and his new wife, Bianca (Cyd Charisse), are on their honeymoon when Ellen, rescued from an island where she has been stranded for five years, returns home. The family dog remembers her, but the children do not. However, they take a liking to her, and invite her to stay. Ellen assumes a foreign accent and pretends to be a woman named Ingrid Tic. Nick, flustered by the revelation that he's now married to two women, makes great effort to keep the truth from his new wife all the while trying to quash her amorous advances. Upon learning that Ellen was marooned on the island with a man, Stephen Burkett (Tom Tryon) — whom she knew as "Adam" to her "Eve" — he becomes jealous and suspicious of her fidelity. To calm his fears, Ellen enlists a meek shoe salesman (Wally Cox) to impersonate her island companion.De La Hoz, Cindy: "Marilyn Monroe — Platinum Fox", Page 232, Running Fox. . 

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Ivan Mozzhukhin as the title character in Yakov Protazanov's 1918 film, Father Sergius. The story begins with the childhood and exceptional and accomplished youth of Prince Stepan Kasatsky. The young man is destined for great things. He discovers on the eve of his wedding that his fiancée Countess Mary Korotkova has had an affair with his beloved Tsar Nicholas I. The blow to his pride is massive, and he retreats to the arms of Russian Orthodoxy and becomes a monk. Many years of humility and doubt follow. He is ordered to become a hermit. Despite his being removed from the world, he is still remembered for having so remarkably transformed his life. One winter night, a group of merry- makers decide to visit him, and one of them, a divorced woman named Makovkina, spends the night in his cell, with the intention to seduce him. Father Sergius discovers he is still weak and in order to protect himself, cuts off his own finger. Makovkina is stunned by this act, and leaves the next morning, having vowed to change her life. A year later she has joined a convent. Father Sergius' reputation for holiness grows. He becomes known as a healer, and pilgrims come from far and wide. Yet Father Sergius is profoundly aware of his inability to attain a true faith. He is still tortured by boredom, pride, and lust. He fails a new test, when the young daughter of a merchant successfully beds him. The morning after, he leaves the monastery and seeks out Pashenka (Praskovya Mikhaylovna), whom he, with a group of other boys, had tormented many years ago. He finds her, now in all the conventional senses a failure in life, yet imbued with a sense of service towards her family. His path is now clearer. He begins to wander, until eight months later he is arrested in the company of a blind beggar who makes him feel closer to God. He is sent to Siberia, where he now works as the hired man of a well-to-do peasant, teaching the gentleman's young children and working in the gardens. 

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A boy named Marco, who is walking home from school, thinks of his father's advice: "Marco, keep your eyelids up/ And see what you can see." However, the only thing Marco has seen on his walk is a horse pulling a wagon on Mulberry Street. To make his story more interesting, Marco imagines progressively more elaborate scenes based around the horse and wagon. He imagines the horse is first a zebra, then a reindeer, then an elephant, and finally an elephant helped by two giraffes. The wagon changes to a chariot, then a sled, then a cart holding a brass band. Marco's realization that Mulberry Street intersects with Bliss Street leads him to imagine a group of police escorts. The scene becomes a parade, as he then imagines a grand stand filled with the mayor and aldermen; an airplane dropping confetti; and, in the final incarnation of the scene, a Chinese man, a magician pulling rabbits out of a hat, and a man with a ten-foot beard. Now almost home, he snaps back to reality and rushes up the front steps, eager to tell his father his imagined story. However, when his father questions him about what he saw on his way home, his face turns red and he says, "Nothing...but a plain horse and wagon on Mulberry Street." 

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In the English version, John McClane and Kris Thompsen (Bruno Delinger and Cindy Holiday) try to save the President's daughter, Caroline Powell from terrorists. There are a number of bosses on the game, including a biker called Hog, a Mexican wrestler named Jocko, the twin team of Mr. Oishi (a sumo wrestler) and Mr. Tubbs (an army general) and pairs of laser-shooting Spiderbots. The final boss, of which all the others are henchmen, is known as Wolf "White Fang" Hongo. At the end of the game, if both players are still alive, the two players will fight each other on the rooftop of the skyscraper to gain the sole appreciation of the President's daughter (similar to the ending of Double Dragon). 

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After purchasing a handful of pubic hair for $10 from 9th grader Scott Tenorman, Cartman believes he has reached puberty and shows it to Stan, Kyle, and Kenny. They tell him that he has to grow his own body hair, which angers Cartman. He tries to get his money back, but is repeatedly tricked and humiliated by Scott, who also steals an additional $6.12 from Cartman and burns the money. Kenny dies from laughing at Scott's actions. Kyle tells Cartman to move on, but he is determined to get revenge. He attempts to train a pony to bite off Scott's penis, but Jimbo tells him it would be best to find Scott's weaknesses. Cartman discovers that Scott's favorite band is Radiohead and creates a plan to make the band members dislike him; they would show up after Scott gets bitten and insult him for crying. Cartman writes a letter asking them to visit South Park, claiming that Scott is dying from cancer. Stan and Kyle tell Scott about Cartman's plan. Cartman gives Scott an invitation to a chili cook off and a ticket for a pony ride. After Cartman leaves, Scott tells his parents that there's a starving, abandoned pony on Mr. Denkins' farm. They go to save it that night and have it taken to an animal shelter. Meanwhile, Scott and his friends cook chili for Cartman that contains pubic hairs. The next day, Scott, Cartman and Chef bring chili for the cook-off. After they sit down to eat, Scott eats some of Cartman's chili, while Cartman scarfs down Scott's, much to the silent enjoyment of the onlookers (including Stan and Kyle), who are in on Scott's prank. As Cartman is finishing Scott's chili, Scott prepares to tell him the secret ingredient, but Cartman then reveals that he already knew, and the chili he is eating is actually Chef's. Cartman says that he told Stan and Kyle about his plan because he knew they would warn Scott. Cartman then announces that his actual plan was to get Mr. Denkins to shoot Scott's parents for trespassing. While Denkins was talking to the police, Cartman then stole the corpses, chopped them up and ground their body parts into the chili he fed to Scott. Scott finds his mother's finger in the bowl, vomits, and starts crying. Radiohead shows up and – unaware of what just happened – insults Scott by calling him "totally not cool" and a "crybaby". Scott yells "Wait!" as they're leaving but they ignore him, making him more upset. As Cartman begins licking tears from Scott's face, Stan and Kyle agree to never anger Cartman to the extent Scott did again. Cartman waves to the camera and says "That's all, folks!" as the background from Looney Tunes appears on the screen. 

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In 1830 Paris, private investigator Eugène Vidocq pursues a strange man who is wearing a cowl and a mirrored mask. The man lures Vidocq into a furnace room at a glass factory, and after a long fight, pushes him into the furnace. Hanging onto the ledge, Vidocq asks him to reveal his face. The masked man obliges, and Vidocq lets go, falling into the fire. Journalist Étienne Boisset goes to Vidocq's colleague, René Nimier, asking for background to help write Vidocq's biography. Boisset states that he plans to find Vidocq's murderer. Nimier tells him that Lautrennes, Paris' chief of police, asked the pair to investigate the deaths of Belmont and Veraldi, the owners of a cannon factory. Lautrennes believes this is an attempt to undermine the French military in an unstable political climate. Belmont and Veraldi had died in a lightning strike, but during the investigation, Vidocq and Nimier see the powder on a factory worker's clothes catch fire. They interrogate the servant responsible for maintaining Belmont's and Veraldi's suits, who confesses that he received a letter, with cash, ordering him not to clean their jackets. The investigators realize that the lightning would need to be attracted to the men and find metallic pins, decorated with monkey heads, inserted into their hats. Lautrennes orders one of his men, Tauzet, to investigate Vidocq's death. For his part, Boisset sneaks into Nimier's office and retrieves the monkey-head pins. He traces the design to Preah, a dancer in a brothel, and Vidocq's lover. She tells him that Vidocq also tracked her down, and that she told Vidocq that she received a letter, with cash, asking her to put the pins in the hats. She also reveals that the letter included a third targetErnest Lafitte, owner of an orphanage. Preah says that Vidocq rushed to save Lafitte, but the masked murderer got there first. Vidocq pursued the murderer, who seemed to possess magical powers and a mask made from a strange reflective surface. Boisset's investigation leads him to Sylvia, the brothel manager, a journalist named Froissard who is investigating the masked murderer, and Marine Lafitte, wife of Ernest. They reveal that Lafitte, Belmont and Veraldi were narcissists, committed to preventing death by aging. A man with a mirror mask, called the Alchemist, offered them an elixir of eternal youth in return for their cooperation in capturing young maidens for his experiments. The three rich men went along, but later stopped cooperating due to a sense of guilt, so the Alchemist killed them. After Boisset leaves, the Alchemist arrives, killing Froissard and Marine. Boisset's investigation attracts the attention of Tauzet, who notices that the Alchemist is disposing of witnesses, and fears Boisset is next. Boisset sneaks in to retrieve Vidocq's notes, where he encounters Lautrennes and Tauzet. Lautrennes attempts to arrest Boisset, but the journalist escapes. The notes reveal that Vidocq found the Alchemist's lab, where he was using the maidens' blood to create a magic substance for his mask, which grants eternal youth by sucking the souls out of his victims. The Alchemist arrived and attacked Vidocq, who managed to take a piece from the Alchemist's mask before the killer escaped. Vidocq's final note states that the Alchemist would need someone to manufacture the mirrored mask, leading him to the glass factory. Boisset, Nimier and Preah head to the factory, ushered by an artisan, and closely trailed by both Tauzet and Lautrennes. Just as Boisset declares there are no more leads and witnesses, the artisan removes his prosthetic, revealing himself to be Vidocq. It turns out Vidocq had jumped into a secret hole in the furnace wall, which he saw in the reflection of the mirror mask before the Alchemist's reveal to be Boisset himself. Vidocq then admits to faking his own death simply to let Boisset's guard down, as he knows the Alchemist would destroy all clues and witnesses through any means necessary. With his cover blown, Boisset lets out a monstrous roar and dons the Alchemist's mirror mask. Nimier opens fire, but is killed as the Alchemist magically reflects the bullets back at him. Vidocq pursues the Alchemist into a hall of mirrors, where he forces the Alchemist to look into a mirror shard, freeing all the souls trapped inside the mask. Vidocq impales the Alchemist with a shard of mirror and throws him into a river. Although the others insist the Alchemist is dead, Vidocq is unnerved by the lack of a body. At Nimier's funeral, as the characters walk away, the Alchemist's laugh can be heard in the distance, accompanied by the glimmer of his mirror mask. 

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Timmy and Jimmy, two disabled children in South Park, are eager to participate in the Special Olympics in Denver. Cartman decides to fake being disabled and attempt to beat all the handicapped children in the events to win the $1,000 prize. Jimmy is talked into taking steroids by Nathan to increase his chances of winning. He manages to keep his use of it a secret from everyone except for Timmy (who discovers the drugs after he accidentally dropped the bag and spilling the contents). While Timmy frowns on this, being unable to say anything other than either his own and Jimmy's names, he is unable to explain the situation to the school counselor Mr. Mackey. Jimmy begins to neglect his girlfriend and studies as a result of his steroid use. When his girlfriend grows tired of neglect and announces she is leaving him, Jimmy flies into a steroid rage and savagely attacks his girlfriend and mother. Kyle repeatedly tries to talk Cartman out of his plans but is ignored. At the Special Olympics, the prizes are given by Mark McGwire, Jason Giambi and Barry Bonds. Jimmy sets multiple records and is declared the winner. Cartman, on the other hand, is so out-of-shape that his plan fails miserably when the more athletic handicapped contestants beat him; he nevertheless wins a "spirit award" - consisting of a gift voucher - for coming last. When he goes to collect the prize, Jimmy recognizes Cartman and is about to attack him, but Timmy intervenes, and Jimmy realises that he is just as much of a cheater himself. Jimmy confesses his drug use to the crowd and returns his medal, asking for his records to be cancelled and that people who use steroids are "pussies" (all the while the camera focuses on McGwire, Giambi, and Bonds during his speech). The people give Jimmy a standing ovation for being honest, and he says he will be back next year. Cartman then claims to Stan and Kyle that he pretended to be handicapped in order for Jimmy to learn his lesson, but Stan and Kyle don't buy his lies; in anger, Cartman calls them "assholes" and tells them to "grow up". 

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Dev Narayan (Alok Nath) lives with his widowed daughter Laxmi (Aruna Irani) and her children Radha and Prashant. Dev also looks after two orphaned children, Gopal and Nita. Laxmi believes that Dev is taking more care of Gopal and Nita, so she leaves the house with her children. When she spots an orphaned boy on the streets, she takes him in. Radha forms a sisterly bond with him and names him Suraj. Years later, Suraj (Salman Khan) is now a famous and popular singer. Radha (Madhuri Dixit) is particularly fond of him – Suraj is grateful to her for contributing to his success. Meanwhile, Gopal (Shah Rukh Khan) has become a wealthy business tycoon. When Laxmi is killed in an accident, Radha and Prashant (Atul Agnihotri) are taken to live in Gopal’s house. Also living with them is Nita (Suman Ranganathan). Gopal asks Radha to marry him and she agrees. Before their wedding, Suraj asks Gopal to watch over Radha, as he loves her like a sister. On their wedding night, Gopal asks Radha who she loves most in the world. She answers her mother and Prashant. Gopal is hurt that she did not mention him. As time goes on, he starts to disapprove of two things. First, he does not like the fact that he and Radha are supporting Prashant financially and second, he does not like the fact that Radha is always on the phone with Suraj. After a misunderstanding, he loses his temper and throws Prashant out of the house. Gopal soon suspects that Suraj and Radha are secretly seeing one another and throws her out of his house too. Radha goes to live with her relatives. Everybody thinks that Radha has simply moved out for a few days. However, when Gopal sends Radha a divorce note, Suraj realizes the situation. He and Prashant tell Radha they wish to speak to Gopal, but Radha does not want them to do so. Suraj secretly holds a meeting with him anyway. Gopal angrily confronts him, pulls out a loaded gun, and asks Suraj to shoot him. After an argument, he leaves. Suraj now believes that he is the reason for Radha’s divorce and feels guilty. He is determined to set things right. Radha realizes that Gopal was angry about her relationship with Suraj. She and Suraj agree never to meet again. Suraj explains the situation to his girlfriend Suman (Aishwarya Rai). Suman talks to Gopal and explains where he went wrong. Gopal realizes that he misunderstood Radha and Suraj’s sibling relationship for adultery. Just as Radha is about to commit suicide, Gopal stops her and they reconcile. They visit Suraj at his show. Gopal and Suraj apologize to one another and things end well. 

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The story takes place during a 24-hour period while four family members take their vacation on a remote island, shortly after one of them, Karin, is released from an asylum where she has been treated for schizophrenia. Karin's husband Martin (von Sydow), a respected doctor, tells her father David (Björnstrand) that Karin's disease is almost incurable. Meanwhile, Minus (Passgård), Karin's 17-year-old brother, tells Karin that he wishes he could have a real conversation with his father and feels deprived of his father's affection. David is a novelist suffering from "writer's block" who has just returned from a long trip abroad. He announces he will leave again in a month, though he promised he would stay. The others perform a play for him that Minus has written. David, while feigning approval of the play, takes offence since the play can be interpreted as an attack on his character. That night, after rejecting Martin's erotic overtures, Karin wakes up and follows the sound of a foghorn to the attic. She faints after an episode in which she hears voices behind the peeling wallpaper. She then enters David's room and looks through his desk and finds his diary, seeing he described her disease as incurable. She discovers his callous desire to record the details of her deterioration. The following morning, David and Martin, while fishing, confront each other over Karin. Martin accuses David of sacrificing his daughter for his art and of being self-absorbed, callous, cowardly, and phony. David is evasive but admits that much of what Martin says is true. David says that he recently tried to kill himself by driving over a cliff but was saved by a faulty transmission. He says that after that, he discovered that he loves Karin, Minus and Martin, and this gives him hope. Meanwhile, Karin tells Minus about her episodes, and that she is waiting for God to appear behind the wallpaper in the attic. Minus is somewhat sexually frustrated, and Karin teases him, even more so after she discovers that he hides a pornographic magazine. Later, on the beach, when Karin sees that a storm is coming, she runs into a wrecked ship and huddles in fear. Minus goes to her and they engage in incestuous sexual activity. Minus tells the other men about the incident in the ship and Martin calls for an ambulance. Karin asks to speak with her father alone. She confesses her misconduct toward Martin and Minus, saying that a voice told her to act that way and also to search David's desk. She tells David she would like to remain at the hospital, because she cannot go back and forth between two realities but must choose one. While they are packing to go to the hospital, she runs to the attic where Martin and David observe her actions. She says that God is about to walk out of the closet door, and asks her husband to allow her to enjoy the moment. She becomes fixated on a crack in the wall out of which a spider emerges. The ambulance, a helicopter, flies by the window, making a lot of noise and shaking the door open. Karin moves toward the door eagerly but then she runs from it, terrified, and goes into a frenzy of panic. Karin vanishes and, reappearing in a frenzy, is sedated. When she stands, she tells them of God: an evil-faced spider who tried to penetrate her. She looked into God's eyes, and they were "cold and calm," and when God failed to penetrate her he retreated onto the wall. "I have seen God," she announces. Karin and Martin leave in the helicopter. Minus tells his father that he is afraid, because when Karin had grabbed him in the ship, he began leaving ordinary reality. He asks his father if he can survive that way. David tells him he can if he has "something to hold on to". He tells Minus of his own hope: love. David and his son discuss the concept of love as it relates to God, and they find solace in the idea that their own love may help sustain Karin. Minus is grateful and in awe that he finally had a real conversation with his father, uttering: "Papa spoke to me". 

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The story starts in January. The audience is not told what year it is: sometime after December 31, 1999, but not very long. It follows a man and a woman, both of whom have had loved ones taken from them in unpleasant circumstances. They see a man being killed by a giant. When they investigate, they discover that the man had been contacting UFOlogists. The two protagonists decide to go on a trip to find out more. They meet an old hippie named Thomas, who saves them from a Fabulous Beast (a dragon). He informs them that they are being followed, and they hide out in Stonehenge, protected by the ley energy of the monument. Thomas then informs them that the world has changed, most forms of modern technology have ceased to function while magic now works according to its traditional lore, and that mythic creatures - Fabulous Beasts, elementals, and most importantly, the Fomorians and the Tuatha De Danann - are coming back to the world. The Fomorians have arrived first, however, and the Tuatha de Danann can only be summoned by a group called the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons. Apparently roped into this, they agree to help. By the end of the first book of the three-book series, the initial idea - that the evil Fomorians would be dragged back to the Otherworld by the good fairies - has been shattered. It seems that Celtic cosmology is much closer to Lovecraftian ideals (Evil vs. Indifferent) than to Christian ones (Evil vs. Good), despite the fact, it is hinted, that the spirit beings are the basis of all religions anyway. The Tuatha are as keen as the Fomorians to stay, and the heroes are left knowing that the world will never be the same again. The heroes then realise that they were chosen by the mysterious 'earth energy', and that they can use this energy to inspire others and fight the Fomorians themselves. They fight back and, in a final battle in London, apparently win. However, the Brothers and Sisters of Dragons are shattered, one dead, one lost in the Otherworld, and the last three to pass the story on. An interesting twist on the classic 'otherworldly conspiracy' story is that, rather than fairy myths being ancient misinterpretations of UFO abductions, the UFO stories are presented as modern misinterpretations of fairy myths. 

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The story takes place in the fictional town of Trinity, South Carolina, and revolves around Caleb Temple (Lucas Black) and the town's corrupt sheriff, Lucas Buck (Gary Cole). Though appearing affable and charismatic, Sheriff Buck is a murderous rapist whose power base is backed by apparent supernatural powers, which he generally uses to manipulate people to "fulfill their potential" and make life-changing choices (usually for evil). Caleb Temple is a normal child whose paternity masks a horrific secret: Lucas Buck is his biological father, having raped his mother in front of Caleb's older sister Merlyn (Sarah Paulson). The horror of watching her mother being sexually assaulted caused Merlyn to become severely emotionally traumatized and withdrawn from the rest of the world, made even worse when her mother committed suicide after giving birth to Caleb. During the pilot episode of the series, Sheriff Buck murders Merlyn in cold blood and manipulates Caleb's "father" (Sonny Shroyer) into committing suicide in order to eliminate Caleb's family and claim his biological son for his own. However, the newly arrived Dr. Crower (Jake Weber) begins to uncover the sheriff's role in the death of Merlyn and Merlyn's father and, with help from Caleb's out-of-town cousin Gail Emory (Paige Turco), struggles to prevent Lucas from corrupting young Caleb. They are aided in part by Merlyn's ghost, who personally appears before Caleb throughout the series in order to try to keep him from Buck's corrupt grasp. 

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In Los Angeles, California, Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter) is a single woman who works as a switchboard operator along with her roommates, Crystal Carpenter (Ann Sothern) and Sally Ellis (Jeff Donnell). On her birthday, she decides to celebrate by dining alone at home, with the picture of her fiancé, a soldier serving in the Korean War. At the candlelight dinner table, she opens the latest letter from him and learns to her shock that he instead plans to marry a nurse he met in Tokyo. Devastated, Norah accepts a date over the telephone with womanizing calendar girl artist Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr). When she arrives at the Blue Gardenia restaurant and nightclub, Harry is surprised to see Norah, since he was expecting Crystal. However, he has dinner with her, and encourages her to drink six strong Polynesian Pearl Diver cocktails. Harry then takes her to his apartment, where he shows her his pictures and plays the record "Blue Gardenia", sung by Nat King Cole, whom they had just seen perform the same song at the restaurant. Norah passes out on Harry's couch, and he makes a sexual advance. She awakens and resists, and apparently strikes him with a fire poker, shattering a mirror. Norah flees the scene, leaving behind her black suede pumps, and returns home. The next morning, Norah is awakened by Crystal; she has suffered a blackout as to the events of the previous night. Meanwhile, at the crime scene, police question a maid (Almira Sessions) about what she found before she discovered Harry's body. She admits to cleaning the poker, which would have removed any fingerprints, and placing the shoes in the closet, so valuable evidence has been compromised. At Norah's workplace, the police arrive to question women who had posed for Harry. When Norah asks her colleague about the questioning, she is startled and goes to read the Los Angeles Chronicle newspaper's account of the slaying. Norah has a vague flashback of the wielding of a fire poker and the shattering of a mirror. Newspaper columnist Casey Mayo (Richard Conte) dubs the presumed killer the "Blue Gardenia murderess." He learns from the Blue Gardenia waiter that the woman was a blonde, and from a blind female flower seller (Celia Lovsky) that the woman possessed a "quiet voice". That same night, at her apartment, Sally reads the newspaper report that the suspect wore a black dress at the time of the murder. Frightened, Norah wraps her own black dress in a newspaper and burns it in an outdoor incinerator. A patrolman arrives and demands to know why she is burning materials at an illegal hour, but he lets her off with a warning after she apologizes. Wanting to catch the killer before the police do, Casey writes a column, titled "Letter to an Unknown Murderess", calling for her to turn herself in. Casey receives many bogus phone calls from local women, but when Norah calls, he realizes she is genuine. After one botched attempt, he meets her in his office. She convinces him that she is actually speaking for a friend, not herself, and Casey tells Norah that he is willing to pay for top legal representation if her friend agrees to surrender. The two later go to a diner, where Norah tells her supposed friend's account of the murder, but still insists her friend does not remember the actual killing. Casey asks to meet her friend at the diner the next day. Norah agrees and returns home, where she confesses to roommate Crystal, who is sympathetic. The next day at the diner, Crystal meets Casey and points him to Norah's booth, where Norah finally admits that she herself is the woman he has been looking for. He feels shocked, because he had begun to fall in love with her. He also feels guilty, admitting to Norah that he was only pretending sympathy for the alleged killer when he thought it was someone other than her. Shortly afterward, the police arrive and arrest Norah. Bitter and confused, she mistakenly believes that Casey is the one who turned her in. (It was actually a diner employee.) At an airport, Casey, with his colleague Al (Richard Erdman), notices that the piped-in music—the love theme from Tristan und Isolde—is identical to the music the maid found playing on Harry's phonograph. Finally grasping the significance of the fact that the records on the machine had been changed, Casey realizes it's possible that Norah was not the killer. Following up this hunch, Casey and Police Captain Sam Haynes (George Reeves) go to a local music shop. Harry's ex-girlfriend Rose Miller (Ruth Storey) is working in the back room at the shop. The clerk tells the police that it was Rose who sold Harry the record, and calls to her to come out and help. Realizing the police are closing in, she attempts suicide. From a hospital bed, Rose confesses that while Norah was passed out at Harry's apartment, she herself arrived, demanding that he marry her. (Although she does not say that she is pregnant, the audience of that time would assume that that was the reason for her desperate demands.) He refused, she says, and started playing the record that had brought them together. (That record being Toscanini conducting Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.) Then, Rose recalls, she noticed Norah's handkerchief on the floor by the record player, and out of jealousy killed Harry with the poker. Norah, everyone finally understands, was simply an intoxicated and confused bystander. After Rose's confession, Norah is freed. She confides to friends that she has forgiven Casey and wants him as the new man in her life. Casey wants her as well, and tosses his "little black book" to his buddy Al. 

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John DeFries, the narrator, is the campaign manager of Clyde C. Manning, a freshman congressman and military veteran who received a medical discharge for a heart condition. DeFries chose the congressman because "he was liberal [but] was tough-minded" enough to attract conservative support. In 1941 Manning is recalled to active duty with the rank of Colonel, and takes deFries as his adjutant. He is appointed to head a secret, top-priority project with unlimited funding, with the aim of developing a nuclear weapon before the Nazis do so. The project makes little progress into 1944. World War II is a stalemate; the British and Germans continue to bomb each other's cities, while the United States, Soviet Union (renamed "The Eurasian Union"), and Japan stay out. Manning hears of fish dying in Chesapeake Bay where the by-products of Dr. Estelle Karst's research into artificial radioactive materials are being dumped. She was a laboratory assistant of Otto Hahn, the first man to characterize induced fission in uranium, and fled Germany "to escape a pogrom".According to Heinlein biographer William H. Patterson, the Karst character is "an homage to Lise Meitner, who worked out the necessary mathematical support for the idea of fission in 1939 on a train fleeing Nazi Germany." Meitner, who was Hahn's co-worker, had to leave Germany in 1938 because of her Jewish origin. See Patterson's comments here Karst is working on radioactive materials for medical uses, but Manning sees its potential as a radiological weapon. Over Karst's objections, by Christmas 1944 the United States is in possession of nearly 10,000 "units" of radioactive dust, a "unit" being defined as the quantity which "would take care of a thousand men, at normal dispersion"; enough to kill the entire population of a large city such as Berlin. Manning seriously considers ordering that all people aware of the secret, including himself, be put to death and all records destroyed. He rejects that course because someone else, perhaps German or Russian, is certain to rediscover it. Instead, Manning in 1945 convinces the President to use the dust against Germany.The reader is told that the President that meets Manning is standing, which means that he is not Franklin Delano Roosevelt. From several hints, such as the President being described as short of stature and fluent in German, Heinlein implies that the President is New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia. In For Us, the Living, Heinlein's first novel, Heinlein foresaw La Guardia being elected President for two consecutive terms in the 1950s. In "Solution Unsatisfactory", Stalin dies in 1941 and Nazi Germany has a new Führer by 1945 with no mention of what happened to Hitler. Since America is officially not in the war, the Americans give the dust to Britain but at the price of the British accepting a complete US ascendancy in the postwar world. The Americans warn the Germans by demonstrating what the dust does to cattle, dropping leaflets over Germany, and having the President speak to the Führer, but the Germans refuse to surrender. RAF bombers scatter the dust over Berlin and leave no survivors. The Nazi regime collapses and the new government surrenders. Karst commits suicide by exposing herself to the dust. Manning warns the Cabinet of the great dangers of the new situation, introducing the concepts of the nuclear arms race, mutual assured destruction, and second strike capability. He convinces the President and Cabinet that the only solution is to use the American nuclear monopoly while it still exists. Any other world power, such as the Eurasian Union, might create such dust and bomb the United States within weeks. Still a congressman, Manning convinces the President that there is no time to get Congressional approval and that the Constitution must be bypassed. The United States issues a "Peace Proclamation" which essentially demands the immediate and unconditional surrender of the rest of the world. All other states are required to disarm and to hand over all long-range civilian and military aircraft, since any airplane can spread the dust. The prohibition on commercial airlines applies to America also; the Army will manage any required civilian air travel. Most of the world complies. The Eurasians did invent the dust for themselves as Manning had warned, and launch a surprise attack. The American victory in the "Four-Day War" owes much to Manning, who had arranged for Congress and President to be outside Washington ahead of the attack, and false rumors of plague to empty New York; nonetheless, 800,000 are killed in Manhattan alone. Eurasian documents completely vindicate Manning's unconstitutional policies; had the President waited for congressional approval, America would have lost the war. Manning becomes lifetime head of the new Peace Patrol, with a worldwide monopoly over the radioactive dust and the aircraft which can deliver it. He opens schools for the indoctrination of cadet patrolmen from any race, color, or nationality. They will patrol the sky and "guard the peace" of any country but their own, and would be forbidden to return to their original country for the entire duration of their service; "a deliberately expatriated band of Janizaries, with an obligation only to the Commission and the race, and welded together with a carefully nurtured esprit de corps." Manning does not have time to complete his original plans for the Patrol. In 1951, the President dies in a plane crash; his isolationist successor demands Manning's resignation and intends to dismantle the Patrol. As Manning argues with the President, planes loaded with radioactive dust and piloted by non-Americans appear overhead. Manning is willing to kill himself and treat the capital of the United States as he would treat any other place which he perceives a "threat to world peace". He wins the standoff and becomes the undisputed military dictator of the world. DeFries (himself dying from radiation poisoning) doubts that Manning, now the most-hated man on Earth, can succeed in making the Patrol self-perpetuating and trustworthy. There is no way of knowing how long Manning will live, given his weak heart. The narrator concludes: 

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The evil Lord Conqueror, head of Conqueror's Clan, is given a prophecy by Mud Buddha when quizzed about his delayed duel with Sword Saint. The prophecy translates that if Conqueror finds two young children by the name of Wind and Cloud he will have good fortune. Mud Buddha provides the birth charts of these two and gives him a puzzle box stating that finding Wind and Cloud is but one half of his destiny, the box will provide him with the latter half once he unlocks it. Conqueror issues an order that every boy with a birth chart matching Wind's or Cloud's must become a disciple of the Conqueror's Clan. Whispering Wind is discovered as the son of long time rival Whispering Prince, who Conqueror had beaten 2 years previously and stole Prince's wife. As they fight again for Prince's Blizzard Blade he reveals he only took his wife to anger him into battle to possess the blade. At the climax of the duel, Prince's wife kills herself and Prince is captured and killed by the fire beast in the nearby cave. Conqueror finds Whispering Wind has fainted and claims him. Striding Cloud's father, a blacksmith named Striding Sky, is forging the Ultimate Sword and completes the blade just before Conqueror's forces raze his village. As he is killed he reveals that the sword can only be used by using his own blood and Cloud is taken by the invading forces. Ten years pass, and Wind and Cloud are now both fully grown and highly skilled martial artists, raised by Lord Conqueror with his daughter Charity and adopted son Frost. The 3 sons act as Generals in Lord Conqueror's army. Wind and Charity begin to form a relationship, but she is seduced by Cloud and secretly has an affair with him. Conqueror is angered by his inability to open the puzzle box, and the disappearance of Mud Buddha. He sends Frost and Wind to find him while Cloud is sent to claim the Unchallenged Sword and kill the clan leader, leading closer to completing his collection of powerful weapons in his Sword Graveyard. Cloud succeeds and Frost and Wind find Mud Buddha, now disfigured by boils as punishment from the Gods for revealing too much about the future to others. Later, Mud Buddha is taken by a masked fighter who easily repels both Frost and Wind. The captured Mud Buddha unlocks the puzzle for Conqueror and reveals that "the dragon is powerful but will be stranded when wind and cloud become a storm" therefore ending Conqueror's tyranny. Realizing it refers to Wind and Cloud and unwilling to accept his fate Conqueror plots to destroy them both. Upon realizing Cloud is interested in Charity, Conqueror decides to use her to marry Wind in hopes of Wind and Cloud killing each other. Cloud discovers the marriage and is quickly angered. On the day of the wedding Cloud abducts Charity. Conqueror tells Wind to fight for his wife if he is a man. Wind and Cloud engage in a battle and Lord Conqueror tries to kill Cloud in their duel, but Charity sacrifices herself to save him. As Wind quietly grieves for his love, Cloud fights the Phoenix family for the Ice Vigor and uses it to preserve Charity's body, but is soon discovered by Conqueror. As they fight in a temple in the desert without water, Cloud's Palm style proves to be useless against Conqueror without any source of liquid at the area. Cloud rips off his arm and uses his own blood as a final resort to be used as source of liquid which is necessary for his palm style to unleash considerable amount of power to create an opening for escape. He is then discovered out cold by Muse and her father, Summit Yu. As they nurse him to health Yu discovers that the Fire Beast Arm he has trained to perfection rejects him and wishes to be bonded to Cloud and calls on specialists to bond his arm to Cloud. Unable to find Cloud, Conqueror moves onto destroying Wind, who he secretly poisons and sends on a mission to claim the Blood Bodhi fruit. As the poison takes its toll Wind remembers the truth about who killed his parents, and uses the Blood Bodhi fruit that grows in the cave to heal himself as well as make himself even stronger. He then defeats the fire beast who killed his father using the Blizzard Blade retrieved by his father's corpse. Cloud trains his new arm with the help of Muse's kindness before deciding to head back to Conqueror's kingdom. Conqueror, believing himself free of the prophecy, challenges and defeats Sword Saint after the latter is distracted by Muse. Frost arrives and announces his discovery that it was Conqueror who kidnapped Mud Buddha and framed Wind and Cloud. Conqueror, now deluded into the belief he is invincible, kills Frost, who attempts to leave the clan. Soon afterwards, Wind and Cloud meet upon the steps to Conqueror's main hall and, united by their common enemy, confront Conqueror. As the fight spills over into the Sword Graveyard, Wind and Cloud are almost outmatched by Conqueror's superior sword skills. However, the blood from a cut on Cloud's arm reveals to him the location of Ultimate Sword (which Conqueror unknowingly had amongst the standard weapons littering the ground). With Striding Sky's sword in hand, Cloud rejoins Wind in the battle and Conqueror is soon beaten, with Wind stopping Cloud from landing the death blow so Conqueror is left insane and tormented by the ghosts of those he has killed, including his beloved Charity. 

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The plot of the first episode centres on the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, coming to the Hitler house. Not wanting the Goldensteins to interrupt the visit, Hitler instructs Braun to keep the news from Rosa, which she fails to do. Rosa duly invites herself over with hopes of matching Chamberlain with her dull niece Ruth. Hitler gets the Goldensteins drunk in an attempt to make them leave before Chamberlain arrives, but they stay. Arny and Eva end up leading the visiting Prime Minister in a conga line around the living room while Hitler hides the "peace for our time" agreement in the icebox.Heil Honey, I'm Home HD: Cinema Snob- Internet Archive Only the pilot was ever screened, although eleven episodes were planned and eight were recorded in which a story arc involved Hitler's secretive attempts to kill the Goldensteins. Unlike the pilot episode, the other episodes had animated opening titles, similar in nature to those of Bewitched. 

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The protagonists of the story are a government agent and his fiancée who are members of a government agency tasked with tracking down and sterilizing or eliminating mutants- individuals with physical abnormalities and superhuman powers (such as the ability to steal the appearance and memories of others) that make them a threat to normal humans. The eponymous "Golden Man" is a feral young man named Cris with gold-colored skin, who does not appear to be sapient but possesses the ability to see into the future (specifically, the ability to see all possible outcomes from any single action, described in the story as similar to a chess player with the ability to see all possible moves 5 steps ahead). The agency manages to capture Cris, but does not execute him immediately, due to their wish to study his ability. Unknown to the agency, Cris turns out to possess another power; his golden skin acts like a lion's mane and allows him to seduce members of the opposite sex. Cris influences the fiancée into freeing him, then impregnates her and makes his escape. The story ends with the protagonist reflecting on how animal instincts have triumphed over human intellect, and how that is the new direction evolution will take if Cris succeeds in replacing humanity. 

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The story follows the course of the life of Suriyothai from her adolescence to her death. As Suriyothai is only known from three lines in a chronicle, most of the film relies on an invented story rather than claiming to be actual history. It presents a young woman, Suriyothai, of minor royal standing who has strong opinions and self- determination. The movie reveals the princess' boldness through scenes where she breaks tradition by walking among the commoners to meet her lover Prince Pirenthorathep, who in turn pledges that he will come to her aid whenever she wants. Her father insists that she must marry Prince Thienraja, the son of the second king of the realm. In an attempt to escape a marriage she does not want, she runs away and is captured by the principal king who explains the possible problems her marriage to Piren might cause to Siam. For the good of the kingdom, she marries Prince Tien to keep peace in the royal families. From this point on she remains loyal to the man she likes but does not love and remains strongly independent. The principal king dies, and Tien's father inherits the throne. A few years later, smallpox makes its first appearance in Siam and the king is stricken with the disease. On his deathbed he extracts a promise of support for his young son from Chai Raja, his nephew, and Tien. Burma invades in the north and Chai Raja assumes the throne to protect Siam. He executes the child king, which Tien protests but on Suriyothai's advice accepts Chai Raja as his ruler. Chai Raja's wife, Queen Jitravadee, dies shortly after giving birth to the heir Yodfa. The king takes a new consort, Srisudachan, and has a son by her. After several years of peace, Chai Raja leaves the capital, Ayutthaya, for a military campaign in the north. Soon after, Srisudachan, descended from the deposed U-Tong dynasty, takes Boonsri Worawongsa, another U-Tong descendant, as a lover and starts plotting to take over the throne. The king is wounded in battle and comes back to the capital to recuperate, where Srisudachan poisons him and attempts to blame the deed on Tien. Tien saves his own life by becoming a Buddhist monk. Srisudachan proceeds by naming Worawongsa as regent and promptly poisoning young Yodfa, thereby assuming power. Suriyothai then summons her old friend Piren, who was Chai Raja's troop commander, to help set things right. His troops ambush and kill Worawongsa and Srisudachan, and Tien accepts the throne despite his monkhood. Upon hearing this, Burmese King Hongsa invades again and lays siege to Ayutthaya. In a dramatic finale, however, the Burmese invade the new kingdom, and Queen Suriyothai heroically rides into battle with her husband and her unrequited childhood love at her side.MovieGuide. "THE LEGEND OF SURIYOTHAI." Rev. of The Legend of Suriyothai. n.d.: n. pag. Movieguide. 20 June 2003. Web. The queen is slain, falling in slow motion from the elephant in full uniform with her throat cut. The ending scene reveals a traditional funeral for royals. 

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Dr. Peyton Westlake is developing a new type of synthetic skin to help burn victims, but cannot get past a flaw that causes the skin to rapidly disintegrate after 99 minutes. His girlfriend, attorney Julie Hastings, discovers the Belisarius Memorandum, an incriminating document that proves developer Louis Strack Jr. has been bribing members of the zoning commission. When she confronts Strack, he confesses, showing Julie that he plans to design a brand new city, creating a substantial number of new jobs. He warns Julie that the city's reigning crime boss, Robert Durant, also wants the document. At Westlake's lab, Westlake and his assistant Yakitito are testing the skin when the lights go out. The synthetic skin is stable after 100 minutes; Westlake deduces the skin is photosensitive. Their joy is short lived as Durant and his mobsters show up and demand the Memorandum, which Westlake knows nothing about. They search for the document, and Durant has his men kill Yakitito and beat Westlake, burning his hands and dipping his face in acid. After finding the document, they rig the lab to explode; it does so as Julie watches. The blast throws a hideously burned Westlake through the roof and into the river. As a John Doe, he is brought to a hospital and subjected to a radical treatment which cuts the nerves of the spinothalamic tract; physical pain is no longer felt at the cost of tactile sensation. This loss of sensory input gives him enhanced strength due to adrenal overload and keeps his injuries from incapacitating him, but also mentally destabilizes him. After waking up from a coma, Westlake escapes from the hospital. Believed dead by Julie, Westlake re-establishes his lab in a condemned building and begins a long process of digitization to create a mask of his original face. Westlake uses the time to plot revenge against Durant and his men; he kills Durant's henchman Rick by putting his head in front of the incoming car after forcing him to reveal the identities of the other men, then studies them to subdue and impersonate them (having a talent for impressionism). When his face mask is complete, Westlake manages to convince Julie that he was in a coma rather than dead. He mentions that he is aware of Julie seeing Strack after his supposed death; she responds that Strack only comforted her. Keeping his disfigurement from her, Westlake instead probes whether or not she would accept him, regardless of his appearance. Westlake sows dissension and confusion among Durant's henchmen by assuming their identities. On a date at a carnival with Julie, an altercation causes Westlake to lose his temper, revealing to Julie that something is wrong with him. He flees as his face begins to melt, and she follows him, discovering the discarded mask; she calls to Peyton that she still loves him regardless. Julie tells Strack she can no longer see him before discovering the stolen Memorandum on his desk, confirming he was collaborating with Durant the entire time. She reveals Westlake is still alive, but Strack tells her as long as he has the memorandum, no charges can be filed. When Julie leaves, Durant enters and is told to capture Julie and kill Westlake. Durant intercepts Julie, kidnapping her before attacking Westlake's lair. Two of his men enter the lab to locate and kill Westlake, but are outmaneuvered and eliminated. Durant flees in a helicopter with Westlake dangling from an attached cable, which he uses to crash the helicopter. Impersonating Durant, Westlake meets up with Strack and a captive Julie at the top of an unfinished building. Westlake's ruse is broken by Strack and they fight; Westlake eventually gains the upper hand and dangles Strack by his ankle in the air. Strack says that killing him would not be something he could live with. Westlake drops Strack, remarking: "I'm learning to live with a lot of things." Julie tries to convince Westlake that he can still return to his old life, but he tells her he has changed on the inside as well, and cannot subject anyone to his new, vicious nature. He rushes from Julie as they exit an elevator, pulling on a mask and running into a crowd of pedestrians. As Julie unsuccessfully searches for him, Westlake watches her for a few moments before turning and walking away, narrating, "I am everyone and no one. Everywhere. Nowhere. Call me ... Darkman." 

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In an English country house, two figures struggle before one of them falls dead. A young woman sleeps as a figure enters her room. The figure is then seen tied to the bed guarded by a South American Indian. It is 11 June 1925, and as a train departs Cranleigh Halt railway station the TARDIS materialises. The crew encounters Lord Cranleigh's chauffeur, who has been expecting "the Doctor". Lord Cranleigh asks them to stay until the annual ball and offers them costumes. They are introduced to Ann Talbot, Lord Cranleigh's fiancée, who looks identical to Nyssa. When Tegan admires a black flower, Lady Cranleigh explains it is a Black Orchid and was found on the Orinoco by her son George. Tegan recognises the name as George Cranleigh, a famous botanist and explorer. Lady Cranleigh says that George never returned from his expedition into the Brazilian forests. Ann was engaged to George. The bound figure struggles against his bonds. When the Indian inspects the figure, he is knocked unconscious. The Fifth Doctor picks a Harlequin outfit to wear to the ball. Ann comes to their room, presenting Nyssa with a dress identical to her own; the ball attendees will be unable to tell them apart. As the Doctor prepares for the ball, a figure enters his room from a secret passage. Hearing a noise, the Doctor returns to the room, but only sees the opening. He enters the secret passage, but the panel closes behind him. The figure takes the Harlequin costume. The ball has started. Lady Cranleigh talks with the Indian. He tells her his "friend" has escaped. The figure wearing the Harlequin costume dances with Ann. The Doctor enters a room full of botany textbooks, finding the secret room where the figure was bound, a book written in Portuguese, and a corpse. The Harlequin enters the building with Ann. Ann tells it they should return to the party, but it grabs her by the wrist. Ann screams for help and a butler rushes to her assistance. The Harlequin strangles him, causing Ann to faint. The Doctor returns to the secret room, finding Lady Cranleigh and the Indian, whom she introduces as Latoni – a Brazilian friend. The Doctor shows them the corpse, which she identifies as one of the servants. She requests he not inform the guests. The figure returns the Harlequin costume to the Doctor's room then goes to a room where Ann is lying, and a hideously deformed face is revealed. Ann awakes and seeing the figure flees into the room where Lady Cranleigh and Latoni are. Latoni gathers rope, advancing on the deformed figure. The servants inform Lord Cranleigh of events inside the house. He finds the dead butler and Ann's mask. The Doctor arrives wearing the Harlequin costume and Ann identifies him as her attacker. Ann implores Sir Robert to arrest the Doctor. The Doctor proclaims his innocence, suggesting that someone else has an identical costume. Ann states there was only one Harlequin. He looks to Lady Cranleigh to provide an alibi but she stays silent. Sir Robert questions the Doctor regarding his identity, and he says he is a Time Lord and that he travels in time and space. Looking to Lady Cranleigh he mentions the other body, but she denies seeing it. Showing Sir Robert the cupboard, the body has been replaced with a doll. Lord Cranleigh receives a telephone call from his friend "Smutty" Thomas who he thinks sent the Doctor to meet him, and he realises it is the wrong man. Lord Cranleigh informs Sir Robert that the Doctor is an impostor; the real doctor missed his train. The Doctor is arrested for murder, his companions accused of being accessories. They are driven to the police station. The Doctor asks the sergeant to divert to the railway station to show Sir Robert the TARDIS, but it is not on the platform. They find the TARDIS at the police station. Lady Cranleigh tells Lord Cranleigh about the other body, that of Digby the servant, establishing his innocence. In the secret room, the bound figure slips his ropes and kills Latoni, after Latoni has hidden the room key. Unable to find the key, the figure starts stuffing newspapers under the door then sets them on fire. The Doctor invites Sir Robert and the police sergeant into the TARDIS. Astounded by what he sees, Sir Robert offers the Doctor an apology, but is still concerned about the murder. Lord Cranleigh telephones the police station, informing them of the second body. The Doctor uses the TARDIS to return to Cranleigh Hall. The secret room is ablaze with the fire started by the deformed figure, who breaks out and goes to the main hall where Lord and Lady Cranleigh are talking. The figure grabs hold of Nyssa and drags her upstairs. The Doctor cannot follow because the fire has spread. Sir Robert demands to know what the deformed figure is, and Lady Cranleigh reveals it is George. She insists George would not harm Ann, but the Doctor points out he has the wrong girl. George carries Nyssa onto the roof. The Doctor asks Lord Cranleigh to distract George while he finds a way to their position. Lady Cranleigh confesses to Sir Robert: George's injuries were caused by Indians, who removed his tongue because they held the Black Orchid sacred. Losing his mind, he was rescued by another tribe of Indians, of which Latoni was a member. She admits that George killed Digby. Lord Cranleigh climbs onto the roof to confront George, and the Doctor also reaches the roof. The Doctor implores him to release Nyssa, telling him to look down and see Ann. George releases Nyssa. Charles approaches his brother to thank him, but George recoils and falls off the roof to his death. Before the Doctor departs Ann gives Tegan and Nyssa their costumes as presents and Lady Cranleigh presents the Doctor with a copy of George's book. 

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Fifteen-year-old Astrid Magnussen (Alison Lohman) is living in Los Angeles with her mother, the free-spirited artist Ingrid (Michelle Pfeiffer). Since her father left before she was old enough to remember him, Astrid depends heavily upon the care of her passionate but largely self-centered mother. Ingrid's current relationship with a writer named Barry (Billy Connolly) ends when she discovers he is cheating on her with younger women. Ingrid murders him with a poison made from white oleander. Ingrid is arrested and sentenced to life in prison, leaving Astrid under the care of the state of California. Astrid is sent to live with foster mother Starr Thomas (Robin Wright), a former stripper who is a recovering alcoholic and born-again Christian. They initially interact well, with Astrid being baptised into Starr's church. Ingrid is appalled at Astrid's religious conversion and manipulates Astrid against her foster family. Astrid begins an affair with Starr's live-in boyfriend Ray (Cole Hauser), which drives Starr to relapsing. After a loud argument with Ray, she runs into Astrid's room in a drunken rage and shoots her in the shoulder. Starr and Ray both flee the scene; the other children beg Astrid not to tell who shot her, so Astrid pretends she has no clue. Astrid spends some time recovering in a hospital before being moved to McKinney Children's Center (known as "Mac"). After fighting with some girls, she strikes up a friendship with fellow artist Paul Trout (Patrick Fugit). Eventually, Astrid is placed in the care of Claire Richards (Renée Zellweger), a former actress, and her producer husband Mark (Noah Wyle). Claire is a fragile but affectionate woman who forms a close bond with Astrid, who finally begins to thrive as a result. One day, Astrid comes home to find a letter from Ingrid to Claire. Claire admits the correspondence has been going on for a while and that Ingrid insists on meeting. During their prison visitation meeting, a jealous Ingrid exploits Claire's low self-esteem and suspicions over Mark's fidelity, much to Astrid's outrage. Claire's depression worsens; during a bad fight with Mark, she agrees to send Astrid back to try and save her marriage. Astrid begs Claire not to send her away. Claire seems to recant, then unexpectedly commits suicide later that night, devastating Astrid. Astrid visits Ingrid in prison to inform her of Claire's death, and that she was returned to Mac. Blaming Ingrid for Claire's suicide, Astrid announces she will never visit her again. In Mac, Paul tells Astrid that when he turns 18 soon he will move to New York. He asks Astrid to accompany him but she coldly refuses. Astrid passes up better foster parent candidates and chooses to live with a Russian immigrant, Rena Gruschenko (Svetlana Efremova), who treats her foster children as cheap laborers for her swap meet business. During her time with Rena, she becomes colder and colder, with her outward appearance matching her inside demeanor. She is approached by her mother's attorney Susan Vallares (Kali Rocha), a woman taken in by her mother's charm. Susan offers Astrid anything she wants in exchange for lying for her mother in court, since her mother has benefactors. Astrid refuses; Rena tells her that she's stupid to turn down money. Rena then offers to make Astrid an equal partner in their business, since Astrid has nowhere better to go. When Astrid balks at the idea, Rena encourages her to use her mother like her mother wants to use her. Astrid visits Ingrid one final time in prison, astonishing her with her appearance. She is no longer blond, but has black hair, harsh makeup, and dark clothes. Realizing she has control over her mother for once in her life, Astrid demands answers about her past in exchange for testifying that Barry committed suicide. Astrid hammers her with questions about Barry, her father, Claire, and a mysterious woman named Annie whom Astrid vaguely recalls from her toddler years. Ingrid admits that Annie was a neighbor with whom she left Astrid for over a year in order to continue living her self-obsessed lifestyle. Ingrid further admits that Astrid's father came looking for her when she was 8, but Ingrid turned him away for leaving them 7 years before. Astrid is devastated by these revelations. Ingrid claims she would take all she has done back, but when Astrid begs her to not make her testify, she refuses. Astrid goes to a comic book shop looking for letters from Paul. He soon shows up by bus in Los Angeles and the two renew their relationship. He accompanies her to her mother's trial as she waits to testify. The courtroom lets out and a curious Astrid goes to see what is going on. She questions Susan, and finds out that Susan was instructed by Ingrid to leave Astrid alone during the trial. Ingrid spots Astrid in the courtroom and they stare at one another as she is led away. Gutted, Astrid stares out the window as her mother is taken back to the bus to return to prison. Paul asks what happened, and she exhales that her mother finally let her go. Two years later, a once-again- blond Astrid has created a life in New York City with Paul. She is seen tending to her art; dioramas in suitcases depicting all she has been through. As she passes them, she closes each, stating she will never visit the horrors they contain again. Pausing at the final suitcase depicting Ingrid, Astrid reflects in voiceover that no matter how flawed Ingrid is, she knows her mother loves her. 

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The Greek army has besieged the walled city of Troy for ten years. The TARDIS materialises outside the city, distracting the Trojan Hector, son of King Priam. The Greek warrior Achilles takes advantage and kills him. When the First Doctor emerges, Achilles believes him to be the God Zeus, in disguise, and brings him to the Greek encampment along with the warrior Odysseus. At the camp, the Greek leader Agamemnon insists the Doctor help them fight the Trojans, although Odysseus believes he is a Trojan spy. Meanwhile, the Doctor's companions Vicki and Steven remain in the TARDIS. Vicki has an injured ankle from a previous adventure, so Steven goes alone to try to find the Doctor. Odysseus catches Steven and takes him to the Greek camp. Pretending to be Zeus, the Doctor persuades the Greeks to spare Steven until the next morning. They learn that the TARDIS has disappeared. The TARDIS has been taken into Troy by another of King Priam's sons, Paris, and presented as a prize to his father. Priam's daughter, the prophet Cassandra, denounces the TARDIS as dangerous – she has dreamt that the Greeks will leave a gift on the plain which will contain soldiers to attack the Trojans. She demands that the TARDIS be burnt. A pyre is constructed, but before the fire is lit, Vicki emerges from the TARDIS, which is taken as a sign from the gods. She is renamed Cressida and made a favourite at court. This enrages Cassandra, who believes Vicki to be a rival prophet, although her handmaiden Katarina defends Vicki. Priam sends Paris out to avenge his brother Hector. Paris calls for his rival Achilles to present himself, but Steven persuades the Greeks to send him in Greek armour instead, hoping to be taken prisoner so he can search for Vicki. Adopting the identity Diomedes, Steven engages Paris in battle and his ruse works. When he arrives, however, Vicki greets him with his real name, which Cassandra sees as a sign they are both spies. Steven and Vicki are taken to cells. Priam's youngest son Troilus visits Vicki. She persuades him to try to get them released, and it is clear the two are falling in love. The Doctor proposes to Odysseus a great ruse: the Greeks will pretend to sail away, leaving a wooden horse behind outside Troy, as a tribute and acknowledgement of defeat, hoping the Trojans will take it inside the city without realising it is actually hollow and filled with Greek soldiers. Agamemnon approves, but only provided the Doctor is among those inside the horse. The horse is spotted by the Trojans, who rejoice at the Greek army's apparent retreat. Priam has Vicki released. Paris brings the horse into the city. Vicki frees Steven, who urges her to convince Troilus to leave Troy. She tells Troilus that Diomedes has escaped. Troilus leaves Troy to search for him, but encounters Achilles, whom he kills to avenge Hector. At nightfall, the Greeks and the Doctor leave the horse and open the city gates. The Greek army enters and so begins the downfall of Troy. As the fighting rages, the Doctor evades Odysseus and finds Vicki. Priam and Paris are slain, and Cassandra taken prisoner. Katarina finds Steven badly wounded and helps him return to the TARDIS. Vicki leaves the Doctor, anxious to find Troilus; outside the doomed city, they declare their love for each other and flee. Odysseus threatens the Doctor, who is able to dematerialise the TARDIS with Steven and Katarina on board. Katarina believes she has died and the Doctor is taking her on the journey after death. Steven is delirious because of his wound, and the Doctor feels he must land somewhere to attend to Steven's injuries. 

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After being defeated twice, Syndicate crime boss Mr. X has started a research company called RoboCy Corporation to act as a cover for his illegal activities. The world's best roboticist, Dr. Dahm (Dr. Zero in Japan), has been brought in to help him create an army of realistic robots to replace important officials from the city. With the replacements in place, Mr. X plans to run the city using a remote control device. His criminal organization, The Syndicate, has strategically placed bombs around the city to distract the police while the city officials are dealt with. Dr. Zan discovers what the research is really for and knows the Syndicate must be stopped. He contacts Blaze Fielding with the details of The Syndicate's plan. Blaze quickly contacts her old comrades Axel Stone and Adam Hunter for a task force to bring down The Syndicate once and for all. Axel quickly joins the task force, but Adam cannot make it (due to his own assignments from within the police) and sends his young brother, Eddie "Skate" Hunter instead. The game has four endings depending on the difficulty level and if the player defeats certain levels in an allotted amount of time. {| class="wikitable" |- valign="top" !Stage !Description !Music !Boss |- |1||South Pier Warehouse||Fuze, Cycle I, The Poets II||Shiva |- |2||Shopping District||Dub Slash, Disco, Boss||Mona and Lisa (Yasha and Onihime in Japan) |- |3||District K Construction Site||Percussion, Bulldozer, Random Cross||Robot Axel (Break in Japan) |- |4||Underground Entrance||Happy Paradise, Tunnelway, Sinhobi Reverse||Yamato |- |5||Syndicate Hideout||Beat Ambience, Moon, Dub Slash||Robot X (Robo X in Japan) |- |6||Rescue Mission||Fuze, Crazy Train||Jet |- |7A||Robot Factory||The Poets II, Cycle II, Inga Rasen, Fuze||Robot Y (Neo X in Japan) |- |7B||City Hall (White House in Japan)||The Poets I, Fuze||Shiva |} 

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During a commencement gala at the newly opened Los Angeles headquarters of Nakamoto, a Japanese keiretsu, a call girl named Cheryl Lynn Austin, is found dead, apparently after a violent sexual encounter. Police Detectives Webster "Web" Smith and John Connor, a former police captain and expert on Japanese affairs, are sent to act as liaison between the Japanese executives and the investigating officer, Smith's former partner Tom Graham. During the initial investigation, Connor and Smith review surveillance camera footage, and realize that one of the discs is missing. Smith and Connor suspect Eddie Sakamura, Cheryl's yakuza boyfriend, of killing her, and interrogate him at a house party. Sakamura promises to bring Connor something, and Connor reluctantly lets him go after confiscating his passport. Ishihara, a Nakamoto employee whom Connor had previously interrogated, delivers the missing disc, which clearly shows Sakamura killing Cheryl. Graham and Smith lead a SWAT raid on Sakamura's house. He tries to flee in a sports car, but crashes and is killed. Smith learns that Sakamura had attempted to contact him about the missing disc, so he and Connor take the disc to an expert, Jingo Asakuma, who reveals that the disc has been digitally altered to implicate Sakamura. Nakamoto is in the midst of sensitive negotiations for the acquisition of an American semiconductor company, with Senator John Morton, a guest at the party, abruptly changing his stance on a bill that would prevent the merger from going through. Suspecting his sudden shift is somehow related to the murder, Connor and Smith attempt to interview him at his campaign office, but without success. Upon returning to Smith's apartment, the duo find Sakamura alive and well. He reveals that he was being tailed that day by Tanaka, a Nakamoto security agent attempting to locate the original disc. Not wanting to be seen with Sakamura, Tanaka stole his sports car and committed suicide by crashing it. Sakamura gives Connor the original disc, but before he can leave, Lt. Graham arrives with Ishihara. Sakamura is killed fighting off Ishihara's men, and Smith is shot and left for dead, surviving only thanks to a bulletproof vest. After being interrogated, Smith is put on paid leave due to an ongoing investigation of an earlier corruption charge. Regrouping with Connor and Jingo, the three view the original surveillance footage, which shows Senator Morton performing erotic asphyxiation on Cheryl. Falsely believing he killed her, Morton changes his position on the regulation bill to stay in Nakamoto's good graces. After leaving the boardroom, the footage shows another figure approaching and killing Cheryl by strangulation. Hoping to draw the killer out, Connor and Smith fax Morton stills of the footage showing his involvement in the murder. Morton contacts Ishihara, revealing the executive to be in on the cover-up, and then Morton commits suicide. Connor, Smith, and Jingo interrupt the merger negotiations to show Nakamoto President Yoshida the surveillance footage. Bob Richmond, an American lawyer working for Nakamoto, reveals himself as the killer and tries to run away, only to be killed by Sakamura's friends. Yoshida maintains his and his colleagues innocence, quietly exiling Ishihara to a desk job back in Japan. Smith drives Jingo home, where she casts doubt on whether Richmond was really the murderer, or if he was simply taking the fall to protect someone higher up in the company. 

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The story begins with Lily Rose, the eldest child, trying to help her mother Rosie with the ironing and ruining a green petticoat. She apologises to its owner, Mrs Beaseley, who forgives her. Mrs Beaseley also gives Kate (the second eldest child) her niece's cast off clothes for her new school, as the government funds to help with this are paid in arrears. Kate loses the school hat, and tries to sell mushrooms to pay for a new one, but the original is eventually found. Jim, the older and more ambitious of the Ruggles twins, meets and joins the local gang, the Black Hands, led by a twelve-year-old named Henry Oates. Though they consider him too young to join and accuse him of spying, Jim begs to be accepted. The next Saturday, as a hailstorm begins, Jim follows a dog into a drain pipe around a wharf's barge-loading area for shelter. Once the pipe is loaded on the barge Jim climbs aboard, hides in the pipe and is carried down the river to the seaport Salthaven. He is still in the pipe when it is loaded directly from the barge into a waiting ship. A man on the ship angrily returns him to the land, and the surrounding dock workers help him to get home. John, the younger twin, is a car fan and regularly visits Otwell Castle's car park. A wealthy couple called the Lawrences arrive at the castle, and allow him to "mind" their car. The same hailstorm which sends Jim into the pipe on the wharf for shelter catches John, and he climbs into the car for shelter. When the Lawrences return, they drive away without checking the back seat, and John does not awaken until they have driven some miles. Instead of turning around and taking him home, they invite him to their son's birthday party, and send a telegram to John's family to let them know that he is safe. William, the youngest Ruggles child, is entered in the Annual Baby Show, but the family is concerned as he is a late teether. He wins his age category (6–12 months) but an older competitor wins the Grand Challenge Cup as William has no teeth. The Ruggles return home only to find that William now has a tooth. Jo Ruggles junior, the fifth child, a Mickey Mouse fan, enjoys watching cartoons at the cinema. On Saturday morning he sneaks inside the empty building and hides in the orchestra pit to see the first colour Mickey Mouse film, where he soon falls asleep; several hours later, several cinema musicians find him. Jo explains why he sneaked in, and the men give him sixpence for the show, and a warning not to do it again. Mr Ruggles receives a reward of £2 for returning some lost money, which he uses to take his family to the Cart Horse Parade in London's Regent's Park, where Mr Ruggles' brother has entered his horse in the competition. The horse, Bernard Shaw, takes first place, and the families climb into the cart to participate in the parade. The Ruggles spend the afternoon at a "posh" tea shop, nearly missing their train home in the excitement. 

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Gear tells the story of a podunk town of squat, hominid- like cats who are bordered on all sides by bigger and more war-like animals. The town's only protection comes from an aged Guardian, a gigantic battle robot in disrepair. The town elder sends four brave cats out to capture an enemy guardian to further defend the town. The cats are named Waffle, Mr. Black, Simon, and Gordon. They were named after TenNapel's actual pet cats. After tragedy strikes the cats in a battle with the neighboring dog faction's guardian, causing the death of Simon, Waffle begins blaming himself for the trouble and goes into the woods to end his own life. There he meets Chee, an insect from another warring faction. The two befriend each other, little knowing of the role they will both play in the oncoming battles. The name "Gear" comes from a mystical artifact existing in the land which promises to greatly increase a Guardian's powers. Many parties search for the Gear, including a secret ninja-like Gear cult. The main plot revolves around the appearance of the gear and the subsequent mysteries it creates. Further themes in the story are the politics of the animal towns, the friendship of the four cats, the afterlife, and giant robot combat. 

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Party animal Rick Gassko (Tom Hanks), who makes his living as a Catholic-school bus driver, decides to settle down and marry his girlfriend Debbie Thompson (Tawny Kitaen). After learning the news of the engagement, Rick's shocked friends, led by Jay (Adrian Zmed), decide to throw him an epic bachelor party. The bride's wealthy, conservative parents are unhappy with her decision, and her father enlists the help of Debbie's ex-boyfriend Cole Whittier (Robert Prescott) to sabotage her relationship with Rick and win her back. While Debbie worries and goes off to a bridal shower thrown by her friends, Rick heads to the bachelor party, which takes place in a lavish, spacious hotel suite, and promises to remain faithful. Both parties start off on the wrong foot because of Cole's meddling. As the bachelor party starts to heat up, Debbie and the girls decide to get even with Rick and his friends by having a party of their own. Both parties eventually collide, leading to Debbie accusing Rick of infidelity. The bachelor party becomes a wild, drunken orgy and the hotel room is trashed, which infuriates the hotel's frustrated manager (Kenneth Kimmins). Adding to the confusion is Rick's friend Brad, who has become despondent over the breakup of his marriage and botches several suicide attempts. When Brad tries to slit his wrists with an electric razor, Rick says, "Well.....at least your wrists will be smooth and kissable." Rick convinces Debbie of his love and faithfulness just as the party is raided by the police. In the ensuing melee, Rick and Debbie become separated and Cole kidnaps Debbie, so Rick and his friends chase after them. The chase culminates in a showdown between Rick and Cole in a 36-screen movie theater, with a fist fight taking place in synchronization with a similar fight being shown in a 3D film projected behind them; the audience believes that the real fight is an extraordinary 3D effect. Rick wins the fight and is reunited with Debbie. After the wedding, Rick and Debbie are driven to the airport for their honeymoon in Rick's school bus, which is driven by a laughing Brad. 

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It tells of a planetary survey team that encounters an immortal woman on an uninhabited planet. The woman reveals that her race has visited Earth over the entire course of human history and were the inspiration for ancient gods and goddesses. The woman, however, causes humans to 'fast- evolve' into large lion-like creatures. 

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The story is set in a post-apocalyptic future where global civilization is governed by a hierarchical, religious society centered on belief in karmic based reincarnation metaphorically viewed as moving forward or backward on a turning wheel. The society presented is class driven, apparently with Caucasians ("Caucs") at the bottom, and Asians and Indians at the top. Above all is the god/messiah, the Bard "Elron Hu" (that is to say, "Elron Hu, Bard"), whose spiritual plan involves one becoming "clear" - an obvious jab at L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics, the self-help book that had been released a few years before. 

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The main character is Coretti, a dull, scholarly man who studies and teaches linguistics and social interaction theory. He sometimes visits bars to help dull the tedium, only choosing bars which have a low chance of putting him in social interaction. Coretti meets a woman in a bar who seems to fit perfectly there. He follows her to various other bars and clubs, watching as she constantly drinks and talks with a companion of hers, her appearance and clothing shifting to let her fit in wherever she goes. His performance at work suffers and his appetite decreases as he devotes all his time and resources to tracking the duo. Coretti spots the man secreting money from some kind of pocket, and realizes that he has discovered a new kind of creature, one that has adapted to modern society more completely than any cockroach, fueled by the alcohol of a hundred bars. The story closes with Coretti's realization that he is, and finally his transformation into, one of the belonging kind. 

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On the night of a meteor shower, Liane goes to Mr. Mackey's party, leaving Cartman to be babysat by Stan's 12-year-old sister, Shelley, who is an aggressive bully. While babysitting, she invites her 22-year-old boyfriend, Skyler, over, who in turn invites the rest of his rock band to rehearse (despite Liane specifically telling her not to have anyone over). Cartman is in his room, playing Wild Wild West and dressed up as Will Smith's version of Jim West from Wild Wild West, but becomes upset with Shelley babysitting him and the boys practising (especially when the former gives him wedgies). Meanwhile, Mr. Kitty is in heat, much to Cartman's annoyance. Later, Skyler's bandmates leave in disgust after performing a song made by Shelley. In an effort to get her back, Cartman takes a picture of Shelley and Skyler about to kiss and tries to send it to his mother via Kitty, but Shelley finds the picture with the cat and removes it. Kitty decides to go out in search of a tom. After an unsuccessful attempt with an overweight tom, she winds up seducing a large group of cats, and invites them back to Cartman's house and cracks open catnip. Eric tries to tell his mother that Shelley is breaking Liane's rule about having boys over, but she doesn't believe that Shelley would do such a thing. Back at home, during the meteor shower, Skyler gets mad at Shelly because she will not "put out" because she is 12 years old. Cartman has taped everything and is about to get Shelley in trouble, but instead comes to pity her when Skyler, angry that Shelley will not "put out" for him, breaks up with her and leaves her crying hysterically. Cartman and Shelley decide to team up for revenge, and sneak into the woods near where Skyler lives. Cartman manages to entice Skyler out of his house with a taping of his Salma Hayek impersonation while Shelley sneaks in and destroys his prized guitar. They return home to find Kitty and many other cats engaged in a massive feline orgy. Skyler shows up, furious, but Cartman throws a box of catnip at Skyler, which attracts the clowder of cats, who attack and rape him. Mrs. Cartman returns home. Shelley and Cartman blame the mess on each other, but Liane, being inebriated, passes out without noticing the mess. Shelley, amazed that they got out of the situation unscathed, celebrates by dancing with Eric as he sings his version of the Wild, Wild West song. 

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Ross (Jason Schwartzman) is a customer of Spider Mike (John Leguizamo), a methamphetamine dealer. Spider Mike and his girlfriend Cookie (Mena Suvari) are constantly arguing, and Ross strikes up a friendship with Nikki (Brittany Murphy), a fellow addict. Nikki takes Ross to meet her boyfriend, "The Cook" (Mickey Rourke), who supplies Spider Mike with drugs from a meth lab he has set up in a motel room. The Cook gives a small amount of meth to Ross in exchange for bringing Nikki home, and says that he will get in touch with Ross if he needs a driver. Back at his apartment, Ross gets messages from his mother and his former girlfriend, Amy, wishing him a happy birthday. Ross, assuming that Amy still loves him, sporadically calls her and leaves messages on her answering machine. He then goes to the local strip club while high, leading to an intense pornographic hallucination. He takes April (Chloe Hunter), one of the dancers he has a relationship with, home and has sex with her in a variety of positions, the last of which leaves her tied to the bed naked. As they finish, the Cook calls with an emergency regarding Nikki's dog, Taco, which needs to be taken to the veterinarian. April tells him to untie her but Ross, still high, duct-tapes April's eyes and mouth shut to keep her quiet and leaves her bound to the bed, playing music to cover her gagged screams. Elsewhere, two policemen (Peter Stormare and Alexis Arquette) working with a TV crew raid the trailer where Frisbee (Patrick Fugit), another one of Spider Mike's customers, lives, falsely believing that a meth lab is located there. They take Frisbee and his overweight mother into custody and threaten him into helping them on a drug bust against Spider Mike. After driving the Cook around town to buy ephedrine pills, beer, and pornography, Ross returns to his apartment to apologize to April. In the Cook's motel room, he and Nikki have a fight after a prostitute arrives in response to the Cook's inviting her around. Nikki ends their relationship, and calls Ross and asks him to take her to a bus station so she can go back to Las Vegas, which Ross does, again leaving April still tied to the bed. While Ross and Nikki are out, Frisbee, now wearing a wire, visits Spider Mike to buy some meth so the cops can arrest him. When he enters, Cookie attempts to seduce him, as revenge for Spider Mike using a phone sex line, but finds the wire. As the cops burst in, a furious Spider Mike shoots Frisbee in the testicles; Spider Mike and Cookie are both arrested, and Frisbee is taken to the hospital. After Ross and Nikki go back to his apartment and find April gone (rescued by his lesbian neighbor (Deborah Harry)), Ross finally drops Nikki off at the bus station, where they share a kiss, and hope to reunite if he ever goes to Vegas. Meanwhile, the Cook's meth lab catches fire and destroys the motel room; he flees to the adult film store, where he is arrested after the owner (Rob Halford) calls the police. Once the Cook makes bail, he calls Ross asking for a ride to another dealer's (Eric Roberts) house in the city, which Ross agrees to do so that he can see Amy, who also lives in the city. The dealer provides the Cook with cash, some meth, and the equipment to start a new lab. The Cook promises Ross six months' worth of meth in exchange for being his chauffeur; he agrees on the condition that he can see Amy first. Amy, who has gotten her life together, wants no part of him after seeing that he still uses drugs and can only give her $100 of the $450 he owes her. As all the other characters go to sleep, the Cook drives a depressed Ross out to an old trailer in the countryside. Ross naps in his car as the Cook sets up a new lab in the trailer, only to blow it and himself up in the process. 

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In 1912 Sonora, Mexico, Arizona lawman Lyedecker chases Yaqui Joe, a half-Yaqui, half-white bank robber who has stolen $6,000. Both men are captured by the Mexican general Verdugo. Lyedecker learns that Joe used the loot to buy 100 rifles for the Yaqui people, who are being repressed by the government. Lyedecker is not interested in Joe's motive, and intends to recover the money and apprehend Joe to further his career. The two men escape a Mexican firing squad and flee to the hills, where they are joined by Sarita, a beautiful Indian revolutionary. Sarita has a vendetta against the soldiers, who murdered her father. The fugitives become allies. Leading the Yaqui against Verdugo's forces, they ambush and derail the General's train and overcome his soldiers in an extended firefight. 

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The film opens in the Rocky Mountains on the Colorado ranch of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, a journalist furiously trying to finish a story about his former attorney and friend, Carl Lazlo, Esq. Thompson then flashes back to a series of exploits involving the author and his attorney. In 1968, Lazlo is fighting to stop a group of San Francisco youngsters from receiving harsh prison sentences for possession of marijuana. He convinces Thompson to write an article about it for Blast Magazine. Thompson's editor, Marty Lewis, reminds Thompson that he has 19 hours to deadline. The judge hands out stiff sentences to everyone; the last client is a young man who was caught with a pound of marijuana and receives a five-year sentence. Lazlo reacts by attacking the prosecuting attorney and is then jailed for contempt of court. The magazine story about the trial is a sensation, but Thompson does not hear from Lazlo until four years later, when Thompson is on assignment covering Super Bowl VI in Los Angeles.Super Bowl VI was actually played in New Orleans, Louisiana. Lazlo appears at Thompson's hotel and convinces him to abandon the Super Bowl story and join his band of freedom fighters, which involves smuggling weapons to an unnamed Latin American country. Thompson goes along with Lazlo and the revolutionaries to a remote airstrip where a small airplane is to be loaded with weapons, but when a police helicopter finds them, Lazlo and his henchmen escape on the plane while Thompson refuses to follow. Thompson's fame and fortune continue. He is a hit on the college lecture circuit and covers the 1972 presidential election campaign. After being thrown off the journalist plane by The Candidate's press secretary, Thompson takes the crew plane and gives strait-laced journalist Harris from the Post a strong hallucinogenic drug and steals his clothes and press credentials. At the next campaign stop, in the airport bathroom, Thompson is able to use his disguise to engage The Candidate in a conversation about the "Screwheads" and the "Doomed". Thompson, still posing as Harris, returns to the journalist plane. Lazlo then appears, striding across the airport tarmac in a white suit. He boards the plane and tries to convince his old friend to join his socialist paradise somewhere in the desert. After causing a disturbance, Thompson and Lazlo are thrown off the plane, and Lazlo's papers that describe the community are blown across the airport runway. Lazlo, presumably, is not heard from again. The action then returns to Thompson's cabin, just as the writer puts the finishing touches on his story, explaining that he didn't go along with Lazlo—or Nixon—because "it still hasn't gotten weird enough for me." 

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Art from Karmatrón y los Transformables #1 (1992 re-run) showing the nineties redesign of the titular character with prince Zacek at the bottom. Cover art by Oscar González Loyo. The story starts millions of years ago, in a very distant place in the universe—Planet Zuyua—where Zacek lived peacefully as the youngest of two heirs to the Zuyuan throne. There, young Zacek learned advanced cybernetics as a career, and he often built robots, big and small, as a hobby. His father, emperor Canilek (Snakestar, in mayan) was the founder and leader of the Great Universal Alliance (a galactic United Nations of sorts) that opposed emperor Asura's militaristic campaign of universal conquest. In issue # 1, Asura's metnalian army invaded Planet Zuyua's capital city and forced the zuyuan people out of their own planet, as thousands of them were exterminated by emperor Asura's bloodthirsty occupation forces. In the middle of the attack, four giant robots programmed by Zacek to activate in case of peril suddenly burst into action, attacking Asura's soldiers and ships and wreaking havoc in the invading army. Enter the first of many Transformables (also known as Guerreros Estelares or Stellar Warriors): Titan, a robot/tank and the Transformables' leader; Aquarius, a robot/submarine; Stelaris, a speedy robot/spaceship and Unicorn, a robot/subterranean vehicle. These four unexpected robotic heroes helped the zuyuans to survive the invasion so they could plan their exodus to a safer planet. However, while zuyuan strategists planned an escape route from Planet Zuyua, emperor Canilek sent his two sons on a quest to seek the Planet of Eternity, a sacred, mystical place where spiritual warriors go to attempt to awake the Kundalini serpent that lived in Mount Meru, and thus gain the spiritual transcendence, wisdom, inner peace and power that comes with being a Kundalini. Canilek hoped that at least one of his sons became the prophetized Kundalini warrior who would defeat Asura and bring back peace to the universe. Unfortunately, Canilek's best friend and advisor, Aspier, was also a spy who informed emperor Asura of Canilek's plans. Aspier was also commanded by Asura to kill Canilek when the appropriate time came, which he gleefully did, helped by the turmoil of Asura's invasion. Meanwhile, Zacek and his older brother Nazul arrived at the Planet of Eternity, but as they reached the sacred serpent's chamber located in the depths of Mount Meru, a metnalian soldier who followed them by Asura's command assaulted the two princes (Asura knew of the prophecy of the Kundalini that would defeat him) and managed to grab Nazul and take him to his ship before he could go into the serpent's resting place. Zacek was unable to help his brother, because the heavy slab of stone that guarded the serpent's chamber entrance slammed shut in that precise moment, trapping him in there. A voice in the chamber told Zacek that he had no other choice than to follow his father's wishes and attempt to awake the Kundalini Serpent, which he reluctantly did. The zuyuan prince underwent the difficult task of awakening the sacred serpent, a feat that only the most spiritually enlightened and pure of heart could accomplish. Zacek managed to succeed in his mission, and became a full-fledged Kundalini warrior. Katnatek, the first Kundalini warrior (and the voice he heard when he entered the chamber) appeared before him then and gave him his Kalpe-Om, the magical item that allowed him to transform in the most powerful warrior of good in this universe (the audience is later informed that there are many possible universes, and each possible universe has its own Karmatron). By uttering a sacred mantra, Zacek transformed into Karmatron for the first time. Fully equipped with his powerful new armor, Karmatron rushed then to Planet Metnal to save his brother, but he arrived too late. Emperor Asura tortured Nazul at his leisure, and then the dark emperor dumped him into Metnal's dreaded Darkness Zone, a place full of twisted, voracious man-eating beasts. Karmatron arrived at the Darkness Zone only to find the mangled corpse of Nazul still being devoured by the monsters who dwelled there. He also discovered that the evil emanations that impregnated the entire planet Metnal were very noxious to him (actually, evil in general was very noxious to him, because he used good spiritual power to fuel his powers) so he could only managed to escape rapidly from that horrid place with his brother's remains in his hands. Asura caught a glimpse of this awesome steel giant that came to his planet, and he became violently enraged then, for he acknowledge him for what he was, and knew him to be the source of many future problems. The comic book followed Zacek's further adventures as he battled Asura across the galaxies, through many millennia, and the story was interrupted abruptly in issue # 298, with Karmatron fighting Asura here on Earth in modern times. The comic book was discontinued then and fans of all ages still hope for the saga to start anew. The lost continent of Mu is featured as the location of one of the base cities of some of the main characters. The Moai of Easter Island are said to be images of a robot called Pazkuash, protector of Mu. Likewise, the ancient Olmec and Toltec statues and artifacts like the Olmec colossal heads and the Atlantean figures are -according to the plot- actually representations of the transformers Olmec and Toltec respectively. 

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On July 5, 1906, Enoch Rucker Blakeslee announces that he intends to marry Miss Love Simpson, a milliner at his store who is years younger than he. This news shocks his family, since his wife Mattie Lou died only three weeks earlier. Rucker’s daughters, Mary Willis and Loma, worry about what the gossips of Cold Sassy will think of their father’s impropriety. Will Tweedy, Rucker’s 14-year-old grandson and the novel's narrator, supports his grandfather’s marriage. He thinks Miss Love is nice and pretty, although she comes from Baltimore and therefore is practically a Yankee. Will thinks Rucker needs someone to look after him now that Mattie Lou is gone. On the afternoon of Rucker and Miss Love's elopement, Will sneaks off to go fishing in the country, despite the fact that he is supposed to be in mourning for his grandmother. He walks across a high, narrow train trestle and nearly dies when a train speeds toward him. He survives by lying flat between the tracks so the train passes just overhead without touching him. Will becomes a sensation after his near-death experience, and the whole town comes to his house to ask him about the incident. Rucker shocks everyone by arriving with his new bride, Miss Love. The people of Cold Sassy disapprove of Rucker’s hasty marriage, and rumors spread quickly in the small town, but Will spends much time at the Blakeslee home and becomes friends with Miss Love. He likes her candid opinions and open personality. He also has a little crush on her and often spies on her. He soon learns that it's a marriage of convenience and that Rucker and Miss Love sleep in separate rooms. Miss Love tells Will that she married Rucker only because he promised to deed her the house and furniture. And Rucker married Miss Love to save on the cost of a housekeeper. Clayton McAllister, Miss Love’s former fiancé from Texas, shows up one day and tries to persuade her to leave with him. He kisses her, but she sends him away contemptuously after kissing him. Will and some of his friends make a trip into the country to pick up a horse for Miss Love, camping in the mountains along the way. When they return, Will and his father Hoyt try to convince Will’s mother, Mary Willis, to travel to New York. Rucker has bought the tickets to New York so Hoyt, who works for him, can go to purchase new goods for the store. At first Mary Willis refuses to go because she is in mourning, but Will and Hoyt convince her that the trip will do her good. Right after she changes her mind, Rucker decides to use the tickets himself to go to New York with Miss Love. Mary Willis is crushed, and her hatred of Miss Love increases. To take his and Mary Willis’ mind off the disappointment, Hoyt buys a brand-new Cadillac and becomes Cold Sassy's first car owner. Meanwhile, Rucker and Miss Love return from New York. They're now flirtatious and affectionate with each other, and Will wonders if their marriage is becoming more of a "real one." Rucker announces that he too has bought a car and intends to start selling cars in Cold Sassy. Lightfoot McLendon is a classmate of Will’s who lives in the impoverished section of Cold Sassy known as Mill Town. One day Will takes Lightfoot on a car ride to the cemetery, where he kisses her. A nosy neighbor sees the kiss and tells Will’s parents. Outraged at Will’s association with common people, Will’s parents forbid him to drive the Cadillac for two months. Will gets around his punishment by driving Rucker’s car. One Sunday he, Rucker, and Miss Love take a day trip into the country, where Will gives them driving lessons. On the way back to Cold Sassy, as he tries to avoid a collision with a Ford wrecked in the middle of the road, Will crashes the car into a creek bed and damages the radiator. While they wait for a repair team, they stay with a nearby family. That night, Will overhears Rucker tell Miss Love that he loves her and wants their marriage to be real. Miss Love declares that she cannot and that no man would want her if he knew her terrible secret. When she finally tells him her secret—her father raped her when she was a child—he says he doesn't care and affirms his love for her. Eventually, Miss Love and Rucker fall deeply in love. Will’s uncle Camp Williams commits suicide, which begins a dark period in Cold Sassy. Rucker hires Will’s worst enemy, Hosie Roach, to work at the store in Camp’s place; because of his new income, Hosie can marry Will's beloved Lightfoot. A pair of thieves rob and beat Rucker.; he recovers from his injuries, but catches pneumonia. As he lies sick in bed, Will overhears him tell Miss Love that God provides strength and comfort to the faithful in times of trouble. Miss Love tells Will that she's pregnant, although Rucker doesn't know. Rucker dies, but his message of faith in God gives Will strength to cope. Though the town and Will's family don't accept Miss Love, she knows they'll accept her child, so she plans to stay in Cold Sassy. 

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Sound engineer Sang-woo meets local DJ Eun-soo on a recording trip in the quest for nature's voice. They succeed in capturing various sensual sounds as well as each other's tenderness. Their love flourishes as spring comes along, but Sang-woo's ever intensifying passion often reminds Eun-soo of her tragic past. She knows only too well how passion can vanish like a sound, and how love always surrenders to its end. 

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El Topo is traveling through a desert on horseback with his naked young son, Hijo. They come across a town whose inhabitants have been slaughtered, and El Topo hunts down and kills the perpetrators and their leader, a fat balding Colonel. El Topo abandons his son to the monks of the settlement's mission and rides off with a woman whom the Colonel had kept as a slave. El Topo names the woman Mara and some days later sexually assaults her. She convinces him to defeat four great gun masters to become the greatest gunman in the land and to earn her love. Each gun master represents a particular religion or philosophy, and El Topo learns from each of them before instigating a duel. El Topo is victorious each time, not through superior skill but through trickery or luck. After the first duel, a black-clad woman with a male voice finds the couple and guides them to the remaining gun masters. As he kills each master, El Topo has increasing doubts about his mission, but Mara persuades him to continue. After the final gun master outsmarts El Topo by killing himself before El Topo is able to kill him, El Topo becomes ridden with guilt, destroys his own gun and revisits the places where he killed the masters, finding their graves swarming with bees. The unnamed woman confronts El Topo and shoots him several times in the manner of stigmata. Mara then rides off with the woman, while El Topo collapses and is carried away by a group of dwarfs and mutants. El Topo awakens many years later in a cave to find that the tribe of deformed outcasts have taken care of him and come to regard him as a God-like figure while he has been asleep and meditating on the gun masters' "four lessons". The outcasts dwell in a system of caves which have been blocked in — the only exit is out of their reach due to their deformities. When El Topo awakens, he is "born again" and decides to help the outcasts escape. He is able to reach the exit and, together with a dwarf girl who becomes his lover, performs for the depraved cultists of the neighboring town to raise money for dynamite to assist in digging a tunnel on one side of the mountain where the outcasts have effectively been kept imprisoned. Hijo, now a young monk, arrives in the town to be the new priest, but is disgusted by the perverted form of religion the cultists practice – notably symbolized by the frequent display of a basic line drawing of the Eye of Providence – and their violent preoccupation with guns, from their church "ritual" through to the film's bloody climax. Despite El Topo's great change in appearance, Hijo recognizes him and intends to kill him on the spot, but agrees to wait until he has succeeded in freeing the outcasts. Now wearing his father's black gunfighter clothes, Hijo grows impatient at the time the project is taking, and begins to work alongside El Topo to hasten the moment when he will kill him. At the point when Hijo is ready to give up on finishing the tunnel, El Topo breaks through into the cave. The tunnel has been completed, but Hijo finds that he cannot bring himself to kill his father. The outcasts come streaming out, but as they enter the town, they are shot down by the cultists. El Topo helplessly witnesses the community being slaughtered and is shot himself. Powering through his wounds, he massacres the town, then takes an oil lamp and immolates himself. His lover gives birth at the same time, and she and his son make a grave for his remains. This becomes a beehive like the gun masters' graves. El Topo's son rides off with his father's lover and child on horseback. 

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Four days after a Weiberfastnacht's eve party (Wed. 20 February 1974), where Katharina Blum met a man named Ludwig Götten, she calls on Oberkommissar Moeding and confesses to killing a journalist for the newspaper Die Zeitung. Katharina had met Götten at a friend's party and spent the night with him before helping him to escape from the police. The next morning, the police break into her house, arrest her and question her. The story is sensationally covered by Die Zeitung, and in particular its journalist Tötges. Tötges investigates everything about her life, calling on Katharina's friends and family, including her ex-husband and hospitalized mother, who dies the day after Tötges visits her. He paints a picture of Katharina as a fervent accomplice of Götten, and as a communist run amok in Germany. Katharina arranges an interview with Tötges. According to Katharina, upon his arrival he suggests that they have sex, whereupon she shoots him dead. She then wanders the city for a few hours before driving to police headquarters and confessing to murder. The book also details the effects of the case on Katharina's employers and friends the Blornas; Mr Blorna is her lawyer, and Mrs Blorna one of the designers of the apartment block where Katharina resides. Their association with Katharina leads to their exclusion from society. 

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Kite revolves around a schoolgirl named Sawa who is orphaned in her early teens. Her parents are the victims of a gory double murder. When the film opens Sawa is on a date with a celebrity, but he begins yelling at an old lady, who had rebuked him for promiscuous ways, being on a date with such a young girl. Sawa kills him, and the old lady dies of a heart attack sometime later, after feeling around for her glasses in the bloody aftermath. The detectives investigating the crime, Akai and Kanie, are her guardians. Akai has had a sexual relationship with Sawa for the duration of his guardianship. Akai also gave her a pair of crystal earrings, each one allegedly containing the blood of one of her parents. Sawa is an assassin, who the corrupt detectives make kill an alleged rapist of young girls. Subsequently, over the years, she kills whomever she is ordered to, including corrupt police officers and corporate fat cats. Sawa's assassinations are famous among the police for her use of special bullets that explode inside the body after piercing the skin. Eventually, Sawa meets a fellow assassin named Oburi, who is of a similar age, and a bond quickly forms between them. Due to their relationship, Sawa slowly gains the emotional strength to escape from her guardians to set out on her own. Oburi is leaving Akai and Kanie's service after killing three more targets, but Akai orders Sawa to kill Oburi instead of letting him go. Realizing that Sawa has the drop on him, Oburi tells her that Akai and Kanie were the ones who murdered her parents, but Sawa reveals that she has known that for years. She lets Oburi live and goes to take out her next target. The bodyguards of this target nearly kill her in a struggle in the men's restroom. During it, she loses one of her earrings and sustains several minor injuries. When Oburi shows up alive, Kanie sends him after a corrupt district attorney, but the man is actually a SWAT officer, who nearly kills Oburi before Sawa arrives and saves him. Oburi confronts Akai and tells him that he and Sawa are both leaving, but Akai overpowers and savagely beats him. Sawa comes to Oburi's rescue again but is captured by Akai and Kanie. Akai appears to decide that just killing Oburi isn't enough, and after Akai says "Sawa, thank me", the screen cuts to black. When Kanie drags Oburi off afterward, Akai tells Sawa he's impressed with the depth of her plan to kill Oburi, saying that he almost believed her act. He tells her where Kanie is going to kill Oburi and that he is looking forward to finding Oburi's body. Sawa then leaves, saying she has an exam the next day. The next morning, Akai arrives at a murder scene. He draws back the covering over the body and flinches when he sees it is Kanie. One of the crime scene investigators reminds him that the body's location is where a double murder occurred several years prior, when the parents of a teenage girl were killed. Akai then goes to where Kanie had been taking Oburi to confront him, but instead finds Sawa, who shoots him in the right hand and groin before emptying the magazines of both her and Oburi's guns into the rest of his body. She tosses both guns into the sewer, then removes her remaining earring and discards it as well. Before Oburi and Sawa can reunite, Oburi is shot by another presumed child assassin – perhaps coincidentally a girl whose basketball he had destroyed near the beginning of the movie in response to an insult – and most likely the assassin Akai was talking about after raping Sawa for the last time. The scene changes to Sawa at Oburi's loft in an abandoned building, waiting patiently for his return. There is the sound of a footstep and a creaking floorboard, and Sawa turns her head to look at the source of the noise before the screen goes black. 

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Set in French Equatorial Africa, the film tells the story of Morel (Trevor Howard), a crusading environmentalist who sets out to preserve the elephants from extinction as a lasting symbol of freedom for all humanity. He is helped by Minna (Juliette Gréco), a nightclub hostess, and Forsythe (Errol Flynn), a disgraced British military officer hoping to redeem himself. 

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The story starts out from the point of view of a crawler constructing one of its curious hives. The crawler seems sentient and to genuinely enjoy building its odd dwelling. The story is set in a small Midwestern town, with references later in the story to mysterious "pools" which seem to cause mutations. Certain families in the area have begun to give birth to abnormal children – "crawlers" – with long, soft, pale, elongated bodies. They have poisonous stings (one crawler stung a dog, who promptly turned black and hard, and died soon after) and pulpy exteriors, and seem to emit a kind of glue that allows them to build. The crawlers seem to love building, and a colony of survivors, crawlers who were not killed by disgusted parents, have set up a hive not far from the town. A government official proposes a plan to move the crawlers to an island, where they can be alone, unpersecuted and with the ability to build as much as they like. The story ends the same way it started; from the point of view of a crawler. The crawler mentions how happy the colony is, and that building is progressing quickly. He comments on how the crawlers will soon reach the mainland, and then work will begin in earnest. The story ends, however, on an uncertain note – some of the crawlers have had children, and those children are not crawlers, but "throwbacks" – us. 

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A brilliant and driven scientist, Jake Terrell, and his young and beautiful wife, Maggie, train dolphins to communicate with humans. This is done by teaching the dolphins to speak English in dolphin-like voices. Two of his dolphins, Alpha ("Fa") and Beta ("Bea"), are stolen by officials of the shadowy Franklin Foundation headed by Harold DeMilo (Fritz Weaver), the supportive backer of the Terrells' research. After the dolphins are kidnapped, an investigation by an undercover government agent for hire, Curtis Mahoney (Paul Sorvino), reveals that the Institute is planning to further train the dolphins to carry out a political assassination by having them place a magnetic limpet mine on the hull of the yacht of the President of the United States. 

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Carlo Cofield, a tourist visiting California's west coast, has not even arranged lodging when his car is smashed by a reckless driver. She is carefree, attractive Italian artist Laura Califatti, who offers her couch for him to sleep that night. This displeases Rod Prescott, a wealthy swimming-pool builder, because Laura is his mistress. After being kicked out, Carlo tries to sleep on the beach and nearly drowns. He is rescued by mouth- to-mouth resuscitation from a gorgeous surfer who goes by the name "Malibu." Carlo begins a romantic pursuit of the much-younger woman. After renting a house near the ocean, Carlo cons a sweet but naive bodybuilder, Harry, who is Malibu's boyfriend, into believing that having sex is harmful to his body. He also bribes a phony psychic, "Madame Lavinia," who is actually a man, to discourage Harry from seeing Malibu anymore. Rod decides to give the persistent Carlo a job as a pool salesman. The affair with Laura is discovered by Rod's wife, Diane, who demands a divorce. As a quarrel develops with everyone present, a mudslide caused by a sudden storm makes Carlo's house slide down a cliff. By the time everyone is saved, they pair off with the romantic partners they deserve. 

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from the film's trailer David Niven plays the owner of a vineyard, who is called back to the estate when it falls on hard times. Accompanied by his wife (Deborah Kerr), the couple are confronted by a beautiful witch (Sharon Tate), who also lives on the estate with her brother (David Hemmings). As time passes it becomes clear that a blood sacrifice is expected to return the vineyard to its former glory. 

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The story takes place in 1971 where the vast majority of citizens own private bomb shelters and financially support nuclear war preparations for their town. New models of "improved" shelters are released and bought every year (much like vacuum cleaners or automobiles) because the Soviets supposedly develop new methods of attack on previously-developed shelters. The story revolves around Mike Foster, the adolescent son of an "anti-P," a movement of outsiders refusing to take part in these preparations because they argue the military industrial complex is only creating fear to sell more bomb shelters. Mike, however, lives in fear that he will not have access to a shelter when the war begins and is a social outcast because of his father's political positions. Finally, Foster's father gives up his resistance and buys a brand-new costly bomb shelter model. Foster luckily boards the new shelter. Soon afterward, news reports the Soviets developed a new anti-shelter technique leaving all recent models totally vulnerable, requiring a new "adapter" to make current models safe again. Then, Mike's Father is forced to sell the shelter back due to economic issues. Foster then runs and hides in the shelter, where he is pulled out by the marketers, and the story ends with a satirical note, a sign saying "PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TO MEN, PUBLIC SHELTER, ADMISSION 50¢". 

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John Dolittle, MD, is a respected physician and quiet bachelor living with his spinster sister Sarah in the small English village of Puddleby-on-the-Marsh. His love of animals grows over the years and his household menagerie eventually scares off his human clientele, leading to loss of wealth. But after learning the secret of speaking to all animals from his parrot Polynesia, he takes up veterinary practice. His fortunes rise and fall again after a crocodile takes up residence, leading to his sister leaving in disgust with the intention of getting married, but his fame in the animal kingdom spreads throughout the world. He is conscripted into voyaging to Africa to cure a monkey epidemic just as he faces bankruptcy. He has to borrow supplies and a ship, and sails with a crew of his favourite animals, but is shipwrecked upon arriving to Africa. On the way to the monkey kingdom, his band is arrested by the king of Jolliginki, a victim of European exploitation who wants no white men travelling in his country. The band barely escapes by ruse, but makes it to the monkey kingdom where things are dire indeed as a result of the raging epidemic. He vaccinates the well monkeys and nurses the sick back to health. In appreciation, the monkeys find the pushmi-pullyu, a shy two- headed gazelle-unicorn cross, whose rarity may bring Dr. Dolittle money back home. On the return trip, they again are captured in Jolliginki. This time they escape with the help of Prince Bumpo, who gives them a ship in exchange for Dolittle's bleaching Bumpo's face white, his greatest desire being to act as a European fairy-tale prince. Dolittle's crew then have a couple of run-ins with pirates, leading to Dolittle's winning a pirate ship loaded with treasures and rescuing a boy whose uncle was abandoned on a rock island. After reuniting the two, Dolittle finally makes it home and tours with the pushmi- pullyu in a circus until he makes enough money to retire to his beloved home in Puddleby. 

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After repeated losses and defeats during the American Revolutionary War's campaign of 1776, the Continental Army retreats across New Jersey. After the army narrowly escapes across the river to the Pennsylvania shore, Washington meets with his officers. In the past six months, they have lost New York City and been chased through New Jersey by the British, and 90% of their troops have either been killed, taken prisoner, or deserted. In possession of the only boats of any use on that stretch of the Delaware River, the army has a reprieve from further pursuit until the river freezes and they must retreat again, leaving Philadelphia open to capture. Compounding their problems, Washington's closest friend, General Hugh Mercer (a physician in civilian life), reminds him that their supplies of food, medicine, ammunition and winter clothing are dangerously low. Realizing that something must be done or the Revolution will collapse, Washington conceives a plan to cross the river and conduct a surprise attack on the Hessian garrison at Trenton. The situation makes the plan appear all but impossible to Colonel John Glover, but due to his loyalty to Washington, he agrees to take the army across. When Washington proposes this operation to his staff, General Gates scoffs at its possibility, going over the line by calling Washington insane and unfit for command. Furious, Washington dismisses Gates from the camp at gunpoint, ordering him into silence. The rest of the staff laughs, but Washington and Glover silence them with the lack of advantages they have. On Christmas night, the Hessians will be feasting and drinking, so the morning after, hopefully still in darkness, the Continentals must take the fight to them while they are sluggish and hung over. The officers have only a few days to prepare their troops and weapons, and the soldiers, until it is time to cross, must be told no more than necessary. Despite their own fatigue and the winter weather, Washington manages to lift his weary soldiers' spirits, allowing the army to cross the river on the night of December 25–26, 1776. The crossing is done in one night, allowing the troops to attack Trenton at eight o' clock in the morning on December 26, 1776, and achieve a stunning victory, capturing almost all the Hessian garrison. The film claims that none of Washington's men were killed or even wounded. However, the Army's standard military history textbook, ROTCM 145-20, "American Military History 1607-1958," states on page 61 that in fact two were killed in action, two were wounded, and two men froze to death during the operation. 

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The story revolves around Augustin Muganza, a Hutu who struggles to find closure after bearing witness to the killing of close to a million people in 100 days while becoming divided by politics and losing some of their own family. The plot intersperses between the genocide in 1994, and April 2004, when Augustin is invited by his brother, Honoré Butera, to visit him as he stands trial for his involvement in the genocide. The film depicts the attitudes and circumstances leading up to the outbreak of brutal violence, the intertwining stories of people struggling to survive the genocide, and the aftermath as the people try to find justice and reconciliation. The plot is also intercut with scenes of Prudence Bushnell, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs for American President Bill Clinton, and her failed attempts to stop the genocide and advise the American government and public to acknowledge the unfolding genocide. 

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The book tells the story of Ted Mundy, the Pakistan- born son of a British army officer, who as a student becomes proficient in the German language. He joins a 1960s-era student protest group in West Berlin and becomes a lifelong friend of a West German student anarchist named Sasha. Having been brutally beaten by West Berlin police and ejected from Germany, Mundy fails at several careers; as a teacher at an English prep school, as a newspaper reporter, a radio interviewer and a novelist. Eventually Mundy obtains a position with the British Council. Meanwhile, Sasha has defected to East Germany to become a member of the notorious Stasi secret police. On a trip to East Germany with a youth theatre group, Mundy and Sasha meet again. By this time Sasha has become totally disillusioned with the Communist Bloc and enlists the naïve Mundy to become a double agent. Sasha has access to state secrets and he recruits Mundy to help him smuggle them out of East Germany and deliver them to MI6, the British Secret Service. Their efforts contribute to the collapse of the GDR and eventual destruction of the Berlin Wall. Later, Sasha and Mundy once again conspire in grandiose schemes to combat American military and industrial globalization. The two ideologues become pawns of the group they thought they were combating. They are framed with planted explosives by American and German security services, who brutally shoot them during a staged raid. After they are killed, they are portrayed as terrorists "with connections to Al-Qaeda", in efforts to convince European governments to support the United States in its "war on terror". After Mundy's death, Amory, his controller from the British intelligence service during his espionage years, tries to publicize the truth, but slander by the British government results in his story being totally discredited. 

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The novel is set in the small town of Shiloh, West Virginia, where an eleven-year-old boy named Marty Preston finds a stray beagle named Shiloh wandering in the hills near his house. Shiloh follows him home. The dog's name is a tribute to a neighborhood schoolhouse. Shiloh's real owner is Judd Travers, who owns several hunting dogs. Fearing for the dog's safety because Judd drinks and treats his hunting dogs poorly, Marty does not want to return Shiloh. His father insists that Shiloh be returned to his rightful owner and they take the dog home to Judd. Shiloh returns to Marty who hides him from his family. Concealing Shiloh in the woods in a wire pen he builds, Marty smuggles some of his dinner to the dog each evening. After his mother discovers Marty feeding the dog, he persuades her not to reveal the secret. That night, Shiloh is attacked by a German Shepherd Dog while in his makeshift cage and his family discovers Marty has been lying and hiding the dog. After taking the dog to the town doctor, the family must return Shiloh to his rightful owner by Sunday. Before doing so, Marty travels up to Travers' house to try to convince Travers to allow him to keep Shiloh. Judd does not see Marty approaching, and shoots a doe out of season, which would mean a stiff fine Judd cannot afford. Marty lets Judd know he knows, and attempts to blackmail him out of Shiloh. Judd and Marty eventually negotiate a deal in which Marty will earn Shiloh for 40 dollars, paid with 20 hours of working for Judd. At the end of the first week, Judd says that he will not keep his end of the deal because the evidence of the dead doe has with the passage of time disappeared. Second, the contract that Marty had him sign is worthless in the state of West Virginia without the signature of a witness. Despite Judd's pointed disapproval of his work, Marty continues to work for him. They begin discussing dogs and Judd's father who began physically abusing Judd when he was four years old. In the end, Judd warms to Marty, repents, and lets him keep Shiloh. 

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In the small town of Burnside, the Jerome's family house is destroyed by teenage vandals, who defecate on the floors and push their daughter down the stairs, placing her in a coma. A childlike stalker calling himself "The Avenger" witnesses the incident and, enraged, begins to track down each culprit. 

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Helen McMahon disappears when her daughter Kit is 12 years old, and it is suspected that she drowned in the local lake. Kit finds a letter from her mother and burns it before reading it, fearing that a suicide note will prevent her from meriting a church burial. In fact, Helen has left her kindly but unexciting husband Martin and two children to run off to London to be with her dashing lover, and left the note to let them know that she would like to keep in touch with her children as they grow up. Kit struggles to grow up without her mother and with the stigma of her mother's death. While Kit has many friends and mentors to help her grow, she forges a close relationship via a pen pal relationship with a woman named Lena Gray, who claims to have been a close friend of Helen. The story then traces the fallout of Kit finding out that her mother is not dead and is in fact Lena Gray. Other characters in the novel who play significant roles in Kit's life are her on-again, off-again friend Clio Kelly, the doting Philip O'Brien who has wanted to marry her all his life, Stevie Sullivan who owns the car garage across the street, and Sister Madeleine, a reclusive older woman who shares everyone's confidences. 

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The South Essex Regiment is in need of recruits so Nairn grants Sharpe permission to return to England to find if the regiment's second battalion has the men needed. Sharpe heads to the battalion headquarters with Harper, D'Alembord and Price and finds only a few wounded men but is told battalion recruiting parties have been seen, yet no-one knows where the recruits go. Sharpe is then summoned before the Prince Regent where he meets Lord Simon Fenner, the secretary of state for war. Fenner has his mistress, Lady Anne Comoynes, seduce Sharpe to find out what he knows, and then sends two soldiers to kill him. Sharpe kills the two assassins and Sharpe's friend Maggie Joyce makes it look as though the bodies are those of Sharpe and Harper. They then join a South Essex recruiting party under assumed names. They are taken to a secret and brutal training camp in Foulness Island, run by the second battalion's commanding officer Lieutenant-Colonel Girdwood and the regiment's disgraced founder Sir Henry Simmerson. Sharpe learns that Fenner, Simmerson and Girdwood are secretly selling the recruits to other regiments after training them. Harper is sentenced to be hunted to death after he tries to prevent a would-be deserter being killed in cold blood. Sharpe rescues him and, with help from Simmerson's niece Jane Gibbons, they escape to London. Sharpe reports his findings to his former commander Sir William Lawford but Lawford tries to do a deal with Fenner which will see the matter covered up and Sharpe paid off with command of a regiment in the American wars. Lady Anne, who has been forced to prostitute herself to Fenner to pay off her late husband's debts, informs Sharpe. Sharpe and his friends take charge of the training camp from Girdwood but are unable to find evidence of the illegal sales. Instead, Sharpe takes the second battalion to London and presents them to the Prince Regent at Hyde Park, proving they exist. Fenner and Simmerson attempt to have Sharpe court- martialled but are foiled when Lady Anne arrives, having found the incriminating ledgers. Fenner is forced to cancel Lady Anne's debts and give in to Sharpe's demands: A proper second battalion and training camp will be set up, while Sharpe will take the recruited soldiers, including Girdwood, back to Spain with him. He also marries Jane. At the Battle of the Nivelle, Girdwood, the regiment's nominal commander, suffers a complete nervous breakdown after his first experience of battle, leaving Sharpe in command until a new colonel is appointed. 

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The novel begins when Tommy Stubbins, the narrator of the story, finds a squirrel injured by a hawk. Matthew Mugg, the cat's meat man, informs him to get help from Doctor Dolittle, who can speak the language of animals. The Doctor is away on a voyage, but when he returns, he attends to the squirrel. Tommy is introduced to some of the strange animals in Dolittle's care, such as the Wiff-Waff fish, and those who care for his household, such as Dab-Dab the duck, and Jip the dog. Polynesia the parrot arrives in Puddleby from Africa informs the Doctor that Bumpo is studying in Bullford. Tommy begins his studies with Dolittle, or rather with Polynesia who teaches Tommy the language of animals. Chee-Chee comes from Africa disguised as a lady and tells about his voyage to Puddleby. The Doctor acquires The Curlew and is thinking of taking Tommy, Polynesia, and Luke the Hermit. They find out from the hermit's dog, Bob, that he was sent to prison for murder but Bob is a witness so when the court is in the process the Doctor proves to the judge that he can talk to animals when this is settled he translates Bob's story to English. When the story is finished the judges conclude that the hermit is innocent. Later, the Purple Bird of Paradise informs the Doctor that Long Arrow, son of Golden Arrow, who is a friend of the Doctor, is missing so after they play the game Blind Travel, which would determine where in the world they would voyage, they decide to take a trip to Spider Monkey Island to find Long Arrow. The Doctor, Tommy, Bumpo, and Polynesia start the voyage across the sea but on the way they discover some stowaways and drop them off at Penzance. Their first stop is in the Capa Blanca islands of Spain; the Doctor makes a deal with the bullfighters that if he can beat them in a fight they would stop bullfighting. Bumpo makes a side bet of 3000 pesetas that the Doctor will win. The Doctor talks to the bulls and they agreed to stick to the plan to make everyone think that he outwitted them. When the fight is over and the doctor wins against the other bullfighters, the crew set off again the Doctor shows Tommy he has caught a fidgit that talks English so he consults it and realizes that if he goes deeper, he will find the Great Glass Sea Snail. Afterwards there is a storm that wrecks the ship leaving Tommy alone; the Purple Bird of Paradise tells him that his friends are on Spider Monkey Island so with the help of the porpoises Tommy reaches the island and the crew. Dolittle finds out from catching a Jabizri, a rare beetle, that Long Arrow is stuck inside Hawk's Head Mountain so they try to find an opening but fail so they use the Jabizri to locate it. When they find a slab in the mountain they dig under it until it collapses and Long Arrow is free. The Doctor finds out from the people of the island that the island is going southward and is going to perish so the doctor gets some whales to push the island back to South America. After this the Doctor is told by the Popsipetels, the people of the island, that they will be attacked soon by their rivals the Bag-jagderags so the Doctor uses the birds of the island as well as the Popsipetels to battle them. The Doctor and his army win but the people then decide after so much he did for them that they would crown him king of their island. So for many months the doctor rules the island and makes good changes for the Popsipetels. Polynesia finds the Great Glass Sea Snail and brings her to Doolittle. He talks to the Great Glass Sea Snail and learns that it is because of the island colliding with South America that it ends up on the shores of Spider Monkey Island so the Doctor asks the snail to take him in his shell with his crew back to England. The Doctor abandons Spider Monkey Island and sets off with Polynesia, Tommy, Matthew, Chee-Chee and Jip and makes his journey through the ocean in the shell of the Great Glass Sea Snail. When they come back to England the Doctor and his crew go back to Puddleby in the doctor's house and Dub-Dub says they are just in time for tea. 

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Errol Flynn arrives in Cuba on behalf of the Hearst Press to do a series of articles on the revolution of Fidel Castro. He notices some changes in Cuba caused by the rebellion. He checks into a hotel and is contacted by one of Castro's agents, a female, who takes him to a beach resort. He meets a young man who offers to take Errol behind the lines to meet Castro. Flynn flies his own plane, meets the rebels, and files several articles, including one of the Cuban Rebel Girls. The movie then goes into the story of two American girls, Beverly and her friend, Jacqueline, whose brother Johnny (Beverly's boyfriend) is fighting for Castro in Cuba. The two girls decide to visit Cuba. They take $50,000 raised by American friends of the revolution to be used to buy guns. They visit Key West and then fly to Cuba. 

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The U.S. government grows worried for the nation's avocado supply after some confrontations with the "Piranha" tribe of cannibal women, who live in the mysterious "Avocado Jungle" (westernmost outpost: San Bernardino) and ritually sacrifice and eat men. The government recruits Margo Hunt (Tweed), a professor of feminist studies at a local university ("Spritzer College"), to travel into the Avocado Jungle and make contact with the women to attempt to convince them to move to a reservation/condo in Malibu. Along the way, she and her travelling companions — male chauvinist guide Jim (Maher) and ditzy undergraduate Bunny (Karen Mistal) — meet a tribe of subservient men called the "Donnahew" (a reference to talk-show host Phil Donahue) and face dangers in their path. Eventually, the trio (Margo, Bunny and Jim) meets the Piranha women, who have recently taken Dr. Kurtz (played by Adrienne Barbeau) as their "empress." Kurtz is Dr. Hunt's former colleague in feminist studies (the internationally famous author of Smart Women, Stupid Insensitive Men) and now her nemesis; she has joined the tribe of Piranha women with her own exploitative agenda. The two argue about the morality of sacrificing men and the exploitation of the Piranha women, and Bunny decides to join the tribe, her first sacrifice being Jim. Bunny cannot go through with the kill, however, and Dr. Hunt escapes, aided by the handsome, intelligent, and sensitive Jean-Pierre (Brett Stimely), who also was to be sacrificed. Dr. Margo Hunt finds in the jungle a rival tribe of cannibal women, the Barracuda Women, who are at war with the Piranha women due to differences over which condiment (guacamole or clam dip) most appropriately accompanies a meal of sacrificed man. Hunt returns to the Piranha stronghold with this other tribe and rescues Bunny and Jim as well as Jean-Pierre. Margo Hunt challenges Kurtz to a duel for supremacy, and they argue while fighting with various weapons; eventually, Margo impales Kurtz with a fencing sword. Kurtz explains her motives to Hunt in her last words: After ruling the Piranha tribe, she cannot return to civilization and the talk-show circuit. She then kills herself by plunging into a pit filled with water and piranha fish. Having discovered the government plot to domesticate the Piranha women by providing aerobics classes and frequent exposure to Cosmopolitan magazine, Hunt refuses to bring the Piranha women with her, and instead persuades the warring cannibal tribes to reunite, maintaining the peace by means of consciousness raising groups. The film ends happily for the trio of main characters: Bunny and Jim are to be married, and Jean-Pierre has enrolled at Dr. Hunt's university as a feminist studies major, becoming in the process the ideal companion for Hunt. 

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In 1934, Ellsworth “Bumpy” Johnson (Laurence Fishburne) is released from Sing Sing and returns to Harlem, where mobster Dutch Schultz (Tim Roth) asserts his control of the lucrative numbers game. Schultz begrudgingly reports to Mafia boss Charles “Lucky” Luciano (Andy Garcia), who pays bribes to special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey (William Atherton) to protect his business. Reuniting with his cousin "Illinois" Gordon (Chi McBride), Bumpy returns to the employ of Harlem crime boss Madame Queen (Cicely Tyson), whose business is threatened by Schultz. Bumpy is introduced to Francine (Vanessa Williams), a friend of Illinois’ girlfriend Mary (Loretta Devine). Schultz’s meeting with the Queen ends in a standoff when he presents her with a rival’s testicles. Walking Francine home from a club, Bumpy charms her with his poetry. Madame Queen is attacked by Schultz’s men, led by black enforcer Bub Hewlett (Clarence Williams III), but Bumpy and fellow mobster Whispers (Paul Benjamin) repel the assassins and rescue her. At a meeting of the Commission, Schultz states his determination to take over Harlem. After robbing Schultz’s operation with Illinois, Bumpy is chastised by Madame Queen for making his own decisions. Schultz then hires two hitmen, the Salke brothers, to kill Bumpy, and has his police contact, NYPD Captain Foley (Richard Bradford), arrange for Madame Queen to be arrested. At a party, a 17-year-old named Tyrone asks Bumpy for a job, and Francine struggles to reconcile her feelings for Bumpy with his criminal ways. The Salkes break into Bumpy’s home, killing his guards, but Bumpy ambushes them and kills one while the other is shot dead by a terrified Francine. Illinois is beaten and robbed by Foley and his officers, while Madame Queen is arrested for illegal gambling. Taking over her operation, Bumpy enlists Tyrone as a runner, and ignores the Queen’s orders to avoid violence. By May 1935, he is locked in an all-out war with Schultz. His wealth and power grow, as does the body count, including Tyrone. Bumpy’s attempt to comfort Tyrone’s mother at his funeral is rejected. At an ice cream parlor with Francine, Bumpy realizes his banana split has been poisoned. When the shop owner reveals that Bumpy’s associate Vallie ordered him to hire the new teenage employee responsible, Bumpy forces the boy to eat the poisoned ice cream despite his attempts to apologize. Whispers then kills Vallie with a razor. Bumpy confronts Schultz at the Cotton Club with Vallie’s severed finger, demanding he cease his Harlem operations; Schultz refuses. Disguised as truck drivers, Bumpy and Illinois deliver a bomb to one of Schultz’s illicit breweries, narrowly escaping before the warehouse explodes. Illinois returns home to find Schultz had Mary killed in retaliation. Threatened by Dewey to end the bloodshed in Harlem, Luciano invites Bumpy and Schultz to a meeting, against both their wills. Visiting Madame Queen in prison, Bumpy is rebuked for inciting a gang war. Finding she can no longer accept who he is, Francine leaves him, and Illinois drunkenly confronts him over the innocent lives lost. Illinois is abducted and tortured by Foley, to Hewlett’s disgust, but refuses to betray his cousin. At Luciano’s meeting, Bumpy and Schultz refuse to settle their dispute. After finding Illinois’ corpse left as a message, Bumpy slits Foley’s throat while he's with a black prostitute, but spares Hewlett’s life and offers him a partnership. Bumpy accepts an alliance with Luciano, and Luciano’s driver – on Bumpy’s orders – informs Schultz that Bumpy will be meeting with Luciano’s accountant. Schultz and his men burst in but find only the accountant, who Schultz kills. At a restaurant, Schultz’s long-suffering henchman Lulu (Ed O'Ross) shoots him in the bathroom, and Schultz calmly returns to his table before dying. Meeting Luciano outside for payment, Lulu is shot dead. With Dutch eliminated and the gang war settled, Dewey – having received an enormous bribe from Bumpy, delivered by Hewlett – warns Luciano to stay away from Harlem. Hewlett and Bumpy part ways, and Bumpy arrives at Illinois’ funeral. After exchanging looks with Francine and Madame Queen, Bumpy walks out into the rain alone. 

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In a dystopian future, after a shortage of food and overpopulation, families are limited to two children. Luke Garner, a 12-year-old boy, lives on a farm with his mother, father, and two brothers. As a third child, Luke and his parents are in violation of a law called the population law. Luke, like all third children, must spend his days hidden or away from public view, or else they will be killed or imprisoned, as well as their families. When the government starts building houses in the woods behind the Garners' house for rich, elite people who are Government officials, Luke is forced to hide in his house. During the day, when Luke's brothers are at school, and his parents are at work, Luke is home alone. One day, Luke sees the face of a child in a window of a house that he knows already has two children. About a month later, he secretly runs over to the house out of curiosity and is caught by Jen, the child who he saw in the window. She reveals that she is also a Shadow Child, a third child, just like Luke. Jen introduces Luke to a chatroom on her computer where he meets other Shadow Children like him. Jen and Luke become friends and Luke visits Jen as much as he can. Jen, who strongly disagrees with the Government, shows Luke books that explain what the Government is doing wrong. He takes these books home. Luke feels guilty for being born because the books tell him that Shadow Children use up resources that other people and animals are supposed to use. Luke then learns about the upcoming rally. Luke finally confesses that he doesn't want to go because he is too afraid. Jen, who feels betrayed, gets upset and tells him to leave as she doesn't need him anymore. He is annoyed and angry at Jen and wishes that the Population Police would shoot her during the rally. After thinking that, he realizes that he shouldn't have thought that. The next morning, Luke is paranoid about what has happened. There has been no report of any rally. Growing more afraid of what may have happened to Jen, after a few months, he breaks into her home again, but there is no sign of her. He runs into the computer room and logs into the chatroom. He sends a message in the chatroom asking where Jen is, but there is no reply. Overcome with his emotions, he reacts too slow as the door opens and a man steps into the room with a gun. He asks who Luke is and how he knows Jen's identity. Luke reveals himself as another Shadow Child who is friends with Jen. He demands to know where Jen is. The man, who is Jen's father, lowers the gun. He explains that Jen and all forty other children were shot and killed in the rally. Luke asks where were the other children because he was told that there would be a thousand. Mr. Talbot explains that she had too much faith in the other children. The Population Police suddenly turn up and demand to come in. The chatroom Luke had sent messages in had been secretly monitored after the rally. Luke hides while Mr. Talbot, who is revealed to be working for the Population Police as well, sorts things out. Mr. Talbot is on Luke's side and wants to avenge his daughter. Mr. Talbot forges a fake I.D. for Luke, so he can travel far away. Luke begins a new life as Lee Grant. He gets sent to a boarding school miles away from his farm and family, where he begins his new life. 

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The protagonist of the series is , the pride of for the most part. He went pro in only two bouts after leaving high school, and his strong punches are universally recognized by his opponents. While he is a natural at boxing, he can't control his voracious appetite. Not surprisingly, Kōsaku eats anything and everything. As a result, he has been forced to change his weight class since high school. Going from flyweight, all the way up to feather weight, something his trainer tells him he doesn't have the frame for. On top of this he accepts challenges from higher weight classes, giving his coach (and himself) constant trouble. Into this picture steps , a novice nun who takes Kōsaku on as a personal project, determined to set him on the right path and break his habit of gluttony. She constantly encourages him, making sure that he stays in shape while staying away from food. Unfortunately, closeness can sometimes breed feelings of affection, which Kōsaku begins to develop. Even worse, Sister Angela realizes she is beginning to have the same problems as well. 

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Kevin (Lance Bass) is performing with his band at a high school graduation party. When he sees an attractive girl, his bandmates try to get him to sing to her and ask her out. He becomes nervous, and envisions himself nude in front of everyone, and faints. Seven years later, Kevin is working in advertising. He makes a pitch for Reebok that is rejected, though the pitch is later used in the meeting by his "partner" Jackie (Tamala Jones), who presents it as hers. As he takes the train home from work, Kevin meets Abbey (Emmanuelle Chriqui), with whom he finds he has much in common, such as their mutual interest in the Chicago Cubs and Al Green. Kevin tries to find Abbey by making posters imploring Abbey to contact him, and placing them all over town. He goes out with a few random women who respond, none of whom are Abbey. The local newspaper finds out about his search and sets up an interview. The reporter, Brady Frances (Dan Montgomery, Jr.), is an old classmate who harbors ill will toward Kevin, on account of a girl in high school who rejected Brady for Kevin. When Brady's article is published, Kevin gets hundreds of calls, which leads to his dateless roommates — aspiring musician Rod (Joey Fatone); slacker Eric (GQ); and art aficionado Randy (James Bulliard) — suggesting they date all the callers to help. Kevin rejects this idea, but a miscommunication leads Eric to believe that Kevin has approved it. A follow up article is published in which Brady portrays Kevin as a failure, which garners even more calls from women. Brady is further irritated when his girlfriend Julie (Amanda Foreman), who is bothered by his grudge against Kevin, takes Kevin's side. Meanwhile, Abbey is having problems with her boyfriend of three years, whom she was visiting when she met Kevin. Her boyfriend buys tickets to an Al Green concert, but then cancels at the last minute. Kevin is also at the concert, but they never see each other, despite several close calls. As Kevin's roommates date the women who responded to the articles in order to find Abbey, they encounter Julie. When she tells Brady that Kevin's friends are answering the calls and dating the respondents, Brady reports this as a scam in a follow-up article. As a result, Reebok declines to work with Kevin, and he is taken off the project. When Kevin subsequently sees Abbey waiting for a train, he tries to get her attention but she only sees him after she boards the train, and the doors close before he can get to her. Kevin also learns that Abbey responded to his public search for her, and when he learns that Eric went out on a date with her, he punches Eric. After Kevin's best friend at the agency, Nathan (Jerry Stiller), suffers a heart attack, Kevin visits him at a rehab facility, where Nathan tells him the story of both meeting his wife at a Chicago Cubs game, and catching a home run from Cubs legend Ernie Banks the same day, and how the two events are tied together. He gives Kevin the baseball and tells him to try to find Abbey again. Jackie apologizes to Kevin, and places him in charge of the campaign's billboards. He uses the billboards to publicly ask Abbey to meet him at the train station at a specific day and time, which garners the interest of the media, who wait with him at the scheduled time. Kevin and Abbey are reunited at the station, much to the delight of the crowd at the station, to the television viewers at home, and to his roommates watching this unfold in a bar. In addition, Randy meets a woman who enjoys art as he does, Julie dumps Brady for Rod, who is offered a recording contract by a record label after listening to a demo tape of his that Kevin sent them, and Brady is given an advice column in the Living section of the Chicago Times. 

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Claudia Hampton, a 76-year-old English woman and a professional historian, is terminally ill and is spending her last remaining moments in and out of consciousness thinking of writing a history of the world with her life as a blueprint. Her first, primordial recollections are of a father that died in World War I, and of the summer of 1920, when she was 10 and competing with her 11-year-old brother Gordon for fossils. Claudia and Gordon are, at times throughout their lives, rivals, lovers, and best friends to each other. When the two are in their late teens they begin an incestuous relationship and find it hard to relate to almost any other person their own age. Soon, however, their college careers and other events allow both to open up to the outside world, and look outward for companionship. At the outset of World War II, Gordon, a would-be economist, is sent to India, whereas Claudia sets aside her studies in history to become a war correspondent. Independent and enterprising, Claudia talks her way into a correspondent's post in Cairo, where she meets Tom Southern, a captain of an English armoured tank division, who sweeps her off her feet. Tom and Claudia fall in love during several long weekends together while he is on leave from the front. But their future together is never to materialize: shortly after their time together, the English are called to defend Egypt from Erwin Rommel's offensive at the First Battle of El Alamein, and Tom is declared missing. Later on, Claudia receives news that he has been killed. Shortly after Tom's death, Claudia finds out she is pregnant, and decides that she will have the child, even though she would have to raise it alone. It isn't to be: Claudia miscarries, and is never told whether the child she had carried was a boy or a girl. That uncertainty, along with her fear that Tom died a horrible and painful death, will haunt her for the rest of her life. After the War, Claudia and Gordon reunite, but the encounter is more friendly than passionate. Each of them has obviously been changed by the War, but they are both sparse on actual details during their conversations. Gordon marries a girl named Sylvia, whom Claudia finds insipid and boring. Claudia meanwhile met Jasper, a well connected young man with whom she goes on to have an on-and-off, rather stormy relationship, and one that Gordon openly disapproves of. In 1948 Claudia finds herself pregnant again, this time by Jasper, and while she has no intention of marrying him, she decides to have the child, Lisa. While Claudia loves Lisa, she finds she has little patience and time to care for a child, and so Lisa ultimately ends up being raised by her maternal and paternal grandmothers, who share her custody and dictate her upbringing. Not surprisingly, Lisa grows up sullen and indifferent to Claudia, and marries a respectable (boring) man at a young age. After reading an article Claudia has written condemning the Soviet invasion, a Hungarian functionary who becomes implicated in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution contacts Claudia out of the blue. Knowing that he will soon be imprisoned, the functionary decides to ask Claudia to make sure that his son Laszlo, who is in England at art college, does not attempt to return to Hungary. Claudia becomes a sort of surrogate mother to Laszlo, whom she grows to love and admire over the years, recognizing that he is drastically different from anyone else she knows: an open, painfully honest, sensitive, self-destructive artist. Claudia writes several popular history books, earning accolades from the public and occasional scorn from academic historians. She also briefly becomes a consultant for a movie based on her history of the Spanish invasion of Mexico, which leads to a personal scandal when she is in a car accident with the star of the movie, and the press suspects there is more to the relationship than just friendship. The event earns scorn from Jasper, who refuses to see her when she is in the hospital. Gordon, on the other hand, visits her to let her know that she is not alone. Later in life, Claudia decides to travel to Egypt alone but finds it much changed. Yet the desert brings back powerful memories of her intense love for Tom Southern and enduring pain at his death, a pain she is still unable to share with anyone else even after all the years that have passed. Shortly thereafter, Gordon dies, and leaves a gaping void in Claudia's life. A few years later, when she is diagnosed with cancer, and knowing her own death is imminent, she apologizes to Lisa for having been a cold and distant mother. Lisa accepts the apology, but is not sure how to feel about it: it is the most unlikely thing Claudia (who to Lisa seemed to revel in being an almost omnipotent figure) has ever done for Lisa. Long after the War, Tom's sister Jennifer reads an article Claudia wrote about her experiences in Egypt, realizes she is the "C." Tom had often referred to in letters home, and mails Claudia his wartime diary. Soon before she dies, Claudia asks Laszlo to fetch Tom's diary for her. Reading over the short entries in Tom's diary, many of which refer to his love for her, Claudia allows herself to reflect on her grief for Tom, her sorrow at having been left behind, and the course her life might have taken had he survived. She comes to peace with the fact that she too will soon become a set of imperfect memories of those who knew her. The next day, Claudia dies. 

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Flashy young bowler Roy Munson wins the 1979 Iowa state bowling championship and leaves home to turn professional. In his professional bowling tour debut, he defeats established pro Ernie McCracken, who takes the loss poorly and seeks revenge. McCracken convinces Roy to join him in hustling a group of local amateur bowlers. When the amateurs become furious after realizing they are being conned, McCracken flees while Roy is brutally beaten and loses his hand when it is forced into the ball return, ending his career. Seventeen years later, Roy uses a prosthetic hand and is living in Scranton, Pennsylvania, as an alcoholic, unsuccessful traveling salesman of bowling supplies. He is always behind on his rent and is constantly harassed by his landlady, Mrs. Dumars, eventually being reduced to trade sexual favors with her for a break on his back rent. On a sales visit to a nearby bowling alley, Roy meets Ishmael Boorg. Roy tries to convince Ishmael to turn pro, with Roy acting as manager. Ishmael declines, explaining that he is from the local Amish community and that his bowling hobby is a secret and must hide it from his family. Roy then sees a poster in a bowling magazine advertising a $1 million winner-take-all tournament in Reno, Nevada. Learning that Ishmael's family is about to lose their farm to the bank, Roy eventually convinces Ishmael's family to let him join Roy, under the guise of going on a mission trip. Roy discovers that the childlike Ishmael is not aware of some of bowling's basic rules and skills. (His 270 average was because he was taught to bowl fifteen frames and not the standard ten.) However, after some coaching, Ishmael improves. The duo earn money in various local tournaments and by hustling bowlers. Ishmael defeats a wealthy bowling enthusiast named Stanley Osmanski, but Stanley attacks the duo after discovering that the roll of cash Roy put up was fake. As the group flee Osmanski's mansion, his girlfriend Claudia, who had also been a victim of Osmanski's violence, joins them. Roy suspects Claudia has ulterior motives and is distracting Ishmael. After Roy gets in a fistfight with her, Ishmael flees. During his absence, Roy and Claudia drive on and end up back in Roy's hometown and at his childhood home, which has been abandoned ever since his father died years earlier. Roy then confesses to Claudia he never returned for his father's funeral out of shame for his failure as a pro bowler. They eventually call a truce, find Ishmael and continue on to Reno. In Reno, the group runs into McCracken, who is now a national bowling superstar. McCracken insults and makes fun of Roy and infuriates Ishmael, who attempts to punch McCracken but instead hits a wall and breaks his hand, leaving him unable to bowl. Later on, Claudia disappears with all of their money after being discovered by Stanley. Feeling distraught, Ishmael convinces Roy that they still have a chance to win $1 million if Roy bowls. Roy enters the tournament, rolling the ball with his prosthetic rubber hand. He rediscovers his touch, progresses through several rounds, and eventually ends up in the televised finals against McCracken. During the final match, Ishmael's brother, who had been sent by the Boorg family, arrives and takes Ishmael back to Pennsylvania. When Roy realizes he is alone, he struggles and McCracken wins the tournament by one pin. Afterwards, Roy has returned to his Pennsylvania apartment, and is seen pouring his liquor down the drain, when he is visited by Claudia, who explains she had disappeared with Stanley in Reno to keep him from hurting Roy and Ishmael. She made Stanley believe she was running away with McCracken to give McCracken payback off-screen, and confesses her love for Roy, offering him money Stanley earned from gambling on McCracken in the finals. Roy responds that he is going to make $500,000 in an endorsement deal for Trojan Condoms based on his prosthetic rubber hand. Roy and Claudia visit Ishmael's family home. Ishmael's parents explain that Roy and Claudia told them about Ishmael's forbidden bowling career, but also about the moral strength and decency he showed during his travels. Roy tells them how Ishmael straightened out Roy and Claudia's lives, with Roy shown to have finally given up drinking. Roy pays off the Boorg family's debts with his endorsement check, and Roy and Claudia kiss before driving away together. 

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Refined but struggling actress Lauren Ames (Shelley Long) finally has a chance to study with the great theatre professor Stanislav Korzenowski (Robert Prosky). Sandy Brozinsky (Bette Midler), a brash, loud actress, decides through happenstance to also study with Korzenowski. Lauren and Sandy take an instant dislike to each other when they first meet in Korzenowski's class, but unknown to each other, both women begin dating the same man, Michael Santers (Peter Coyote). When Michael "dies" in a gas explosion at a local store, Lauren and Sandy figure out that Michael may have faked his death, and they form an uneasy alliance to follow leads across the country to find him and force him to choose between them. During their quest, Lauren and Sandy are chased by CIA agents, as well as Russian assassins who are also after Michael. When Lauren and Sandy finally find Michael, he tries to kill both of them and they are forced to run until they are captured by the federal agents. Lauren and Sandy learn that Michael is a double agent for the CIA who has now gone rogue, also working for the KGB, and that he has stolen a toxin that could destroy huge areas of nature with just a few drops. The CIA wants to find Michael to force him to give back the toxin bio-weapon, while the Russian assassins are men cheated by the double agent who works for Korzenowski, their theatre professor. The chase leads to rural New Mexico when Lauren is taken hostage by Michael and his rogue associates who force a trade with the CIA for the toxin, and with Korzenowski with the stolen cash he intended to give to Michael. When the trade goes awry, Lauren gets away with both the money and the toxin, with Michael in hot pursuit. Cornered on a series of mountain tops, Lauren uses her former ballet skills to evade him, culminating in a grand jeté, as pursuing Michael slips and is presumably killed on the rocks far below while the money is lost to Native Americans. The women form a lasting friendship, and go on to perform Hamlet together, with Lauren in the title role and Sandy as Ophelia. 

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The movie begins with a young woman, who attended a wedding party held in a hotel and became drunk, waking up in one of the hotel rooms; only to realize in horror that her kidney has been surgically removed. Socialite Ching (Angelica Lee), who also attended the party, identified Ling (Karena Lam) as the prime suspect because she found out that Ling was the only stranger presented in the ball room. She is unknown to everyone in the party, even to the hotel staff. During the police investigation, Ching discovers that Ling has been secretly involved with her boyfriend Wai (Andy Hui Chi-On), and this is the very reason why she was in the hotel when the crime was committed. Ling was released uncharged due to insufficient evidence as police believed Ching could be framing her for cheating with her boyfriend. Rather than quickly disappear, Ling starts stalking Ching, apparently jealous that Ching could have everything Ling wanted without an effort while Ling has to fight for it. Ching, at the beginning, sees that as a form of harassment, but soon twists it around and follows Ling instead. Ling seems accepting of this, showing her the darker side of life living as a poor girl compared to Ching's rich-girl background. The two engage in a subtle cat-and-mouse game, and Ching begins to fear for her life when Ling starts making threats to remove her kidney too. One night, Ching is kidnapped by a mysterious man that seems to be an ally of Ling's. Here, Ching reveals that her kidney is weak, and the man will not be able to sell it for much. She passes out, and wakes to find Ling injured beside her. Ching takes her to the hospital, and it isn't long before Ching finds out that Ling is actually a kind person, more true then the friendships Ching shares with her superficial socialite friends. She learns that Ling has a childhood sweetheart, whose identity she does not reveal. Ching and Ling then make a deal with the mysterious man so that Ching can get a kidney. However Ching informs the police beforehand, and when they arrive, the man holds Ling hostage. However, Ling supposedly kills the man. Wai begins to suspect Ling, and breaks into her house. Meanwhile, Ching invites Ling to her house where she learns that the man who was killed was none other than Ling's childhood sweetheart. Ling tells her that since she was in need of money for her mother, she and the man planned to make a living selling kidneys. However, because of Ching's 'betrayal', the man killed himself. Ling then discovers that Wai has been searching her house. She holds Wai hostage and asks Ching to come to her workplace, a research center, and give her kidney. Ching, armed with an axe chases Ling, her anger intensifying when she learns that Wai is dead. But Ling suffocates her with plastic. In the end, Ching wakes up in hospital, where a doctor tells her that she was in critical condition, but saved by a kidney that belonged to the dead at the scene where she was found. She realizes that Ling hacked herself to death to give her the kidney she always wanted. Unable to digest this information, she starts screaming, begging the doctor to remove her kidney, as the camera cuts to a shot of Ching telling Ling they will always be together, and another of Ling lying dead with her voiceover saying, "You'll owe me this forever." There is a final shot of Ching, under the effect of sedatives, falling unconscious. 

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A group of paranoid mental patients, long stranded on an alien planet by shipwreck of the robot controlled hospital spaceship transporting them to a mental hospital, believe themselves to be constantly under attack by aliens or Terrans. They discover the damaged ship in a bog, and from recorded tapes they learn their condition and the circumstances of the shipwreck. Even when they discover this evidence of the truth and attempt to verify or disprove the information on the ship's tapes, they construct sophisticated explanations to explain the "attacks" as a plot by the enemy who they now regard as definitely Terrans. After much internal dispute and sometimes violent conflict at the end of the story the survivors of the infighting are unsure if they are paranoid or victims of a plot. As one of them states they are like rulers who are all 12 or 13 inches long so have no basis for comparison. The central question of this story is how would people determine whether their judgments are reasonable or unreasonably paranoid when they agree they have evidence that all or none of them are, in fact, paranoid. This story was later expanded in the novel Clans of the Alphane Moon. 

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Professor Edward Travers, an anthropologist and explorer, is awoken from his sleep when he hears the screams of his companion. He is horrified to see a lumbering, hairy creature standing over his friend's lifeless body. The TARDIS lands in Tibet in the Himalayas. The Second Doctor talks about a monastery's bell he has from a previous journey and then goes to explore by himself. He sees a large footprint and, while he is examining it, a hairy creature passes behind him unnoticed. The Doctor goes back to the TARDIS to take the bell and advises Jamie and Victoria to stay in the TARDIS. The Doctor finds the two empty sleeping bags, the twisted remains of a rifle and a dead man. The Doctor arrives at Detsen Monastery, which seems to be deserted. A group of men comes in and the Doctor is accused of having killed Travers' companion, based on the fact that the Doctor is carrying their sack. While the Doctor is locked in a cell, Travers tells him about his mission: finding the Yeti. It appears there have been some deaths recently, but the Professor says the Yeti cannot be the culprit because of its shy nature. Meanwhile, Jamie and Victoria decide to step outside. They find the big footprints all around the TARDIS. Jamie would like to obey the Doctor and go back to the TARDIS, but Victoria insists and they find a cave, in which they are soon trapped. The two try to find another exit and accidentally discover a chamber containing a pyramid of metal spheres. Suddenly a Yeti moves the boulder that blocked the cave. Jamie tries to fight it with a scimitar, but the Yeti is too strong. Jamie causes some rocks to fall on it and he and Victoria are able to escape with one of the strange illuminated spheres. They head toward the monastery, where the Doctor is still being detained on Khrisong's orders. He has, nevertheless, been able to pass on the Ghanta to the friendly monk Thonmi. Thonmi takes it to Abbot Songsten, who is in communion with the master of the monastery, Padmasambhava. Padmasambhava knows the Doctor from his previous visit, and though he knows of the Doctor's wisdom, he fears he will intervene in The Great Plan. Thonmi is told to depart, his memory wiped of what he has heard, though given the instruction that the Doctor should be released unharmed. The Doctor has meanwhile been placed on trial and, as a test of whether he controls the Yeti, is tied to the doors of the monastery to lure the Yeti out. Travers has by now met Jamie and Victoria, who convince him the Doctor is no threat. The trio return to the monastery to see the Doctor freed on the Abbot's instructions. Shortly afterward, the Yeti advance in an abortive attack on the monastery, during which one of them is overpowered and rendered dormant. The Doctor deduces it is a robot, controlled by a missing spherical unit from its chest cavity. The awakened Yeti battles its way out of Detsen, killing warrior monks and leaving Khrisong angry that Thonmi opened the door to allow it to flee – albeit to avoid further bloodshed. Victoria and Thonmi are imprisoned for supposedly reviving the creature. The Abbot reports to Padmasambhava that their plan is working, and the old master replies that the Great Intelligence is taking on corporeal form. To make way for the next phase, Padmasambhava orders all monks to leave the monastery. When the Doctor and Jamie reach the TARDIS, they find it guarded by another Yeti, but it is inactive and the Doctor takes out its control sphere, which then returns to life. Jamie prevents it from re-entering the dormant Yeti by lodging a rock in the open chest cavity. They head back to the monastery, where the Doctor forges an alliance with Khrisong based on the need to enable the monks to stay at the monastery. Realising the monks will not leave peacefully, Songsten opens the gates of the monastery to more Yeti. Victoria has escaped and ventured alone to the Inner Sanctum of the monastery, where she finds Padmasambhava. Victoria realises he is commanding the robots. He wipes her mind of their meeting and summons more Yeti to attack. The Doctor helps Victoria recover from her trance-like state and listens to Travers, who is recovering his senses and explains about the cave and the pyramid. The Doctor pieces together the nature of the threat while Travers recalls that Songsten was in the cave too. It is clear Songsten is the link between the Yeti and the monastery. In the Inner Sanctum, Songsten has bowed to the will of the Great Intelligence and slays Khrisong. The Doctor and his friends arrive and overpower Songsten, realising he has been entranced. Songsten is bound and returned to the other monks, and the violence of his manner persuades them that he is the threat to Detsen. The Doctor tells the monks to flee so that he can defeat the Intelligence. With Jamie, Victoria, and Thonmi, he plans to destroy the equipment the Intelligence is using through Padmasambhava to control the robotic Yeti. They venture to the Inner Sanctum, where the Doctor distracts the being while Thonmi and Jamie destroy the equipment used to relay instructions to the Yeti. Destroying a further pyramid of spheres expels the Intelligence and, left in peace, Padmasambhava dies. With the danger over, the travelers depart. Travers accompanies them up the mountain and his belief in the real Yeti is renewed when he spots one. He charges off to investigate as the TARDIS departs. 

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Carly, her boyfriend Wade, her brother Nick, her best friend Paige, Paige's boyfriend Blake, and Nick's friend Dalton are on their way to a football game in Louisiana. The night before the game they camp in a field. A stranger in a pickup truck arrives, then leaves when Nick smashes one of his headlights. The next morning, Wade discovers that his car's fan belt is broken and Carly falls into a pit of rotting animal carcasses. After rescuing her, the group meet Lester, who drives Carly and Wade to the nearby town of Ambrose for a new fan belt while the rest head to the football game. Carly and Wade arrive in Ambrose, which is virtually a ghost town. At the church, they find a funeral in progress and meet Bo, a mechanic, who offers to sell them a fan belt after the funeral. While they wait, they visit "Trudy's House of Wax", a wax museum which itself is made of wax and is the central feature of the town. They follow Bo to his house to get the right size fan belt, where Wade is knocked unconscious by Bo's twin brother Vincent, who wears a wax mask to cover his face, disfigured from where the twins were once conjoined. Outside, Carly notices a broken headlight on Bo's truck and realizes he is the man who visited the campsite. Bo captures Carly and restrains her in the cellar of the gas station, gluing her lips shut. Meanwhile, Vincent brings Wade to the House of Wax's workshop, where he is stripped naked and his body is covered in molten wax. Nick, Dalton, Paige and Blake realize they will not arrive at the game in time. Paige and Blake return to the campsite while Nick and Dalton arrive in town looking for Carly and Wade. Nick asks Bo about Carly's whereabouts. When she tries to gain Nick's attention, Bo cuts off the tip of Carly's finger, but she manages to tear her lips apart and screams for help. Nick fends off Bo and frees Carly while Dalton visits the House of Wax and finds Wade, who is unable to move in his wax coating. Dalton attempts to free Wade by peeling off the wax from his face, but inadvertently removes his skin in the process. Dalton is then ambushed by Vincent, who corners and decapitates him. Carly and Nick realize that the wax figures are actually the wax-coated corpses of the town's residents and previous visitors and that Bo has been manipulating Vincent, who is currently running their mother's business, into murdering the people he lured into town to make the figures look more realistic. Back at the campsite, Vincent arrives and kills Blake, then chases Paige to an abandoned sugar mill, where he throws a metal pipe through her forehead. Bo and Vincent return to chase Carly and Nick into the House of Wax. Nick unintentionally starts a massive fire, which causes the figures and the entire museum to melt. Carly beats Bo to death with a baseball bat when he fights Nick and stabs him in the leg. Vincent chases Carly to the top floor where she tries to reason with him about his brother's treachery, but is able to stab him in the back with Nick's help. Vincent's body falls through the floor and lands on top of Bo's corpse, as Carly and Nick escape from the museum as it melts to the ground. The next morning, the police arrive and report that Ambrose has been abandoned for ten years since the local sugar mill was shut down. As Nick and Carly are taken to a hospital, the police learn that the Sinclairs had a third son. From inside the ambulance, Carly spots Lester with the Sinclairs' family dog, waving them goodbye as they are driven out of town, implying that he is the third son. 

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The main character, Sam, decided to work in Hong Kong after graduating from school in Singapore, as a way to gain a wider exposure in life It was in Hong Kong when he encountered Jane at a movie theater, by chance. Following the encounter, Sam's fascination for Jane led him to discover a lifestyle that is, until now, unknown to him. 

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Singapore in the 1920s sets the stage for the dramatic romance between a young Asian woman (Fann Wong) and a married American industrialist (Philippe Brenninkmeyer). It is a love doomed by laws and tradition, but which yields a child, Harmony (Maggie Q). After finishing her studies, she goes to America and becomes a successful maker and distributor of herbal medicines. She also falls in love with her father's adopted son (Daniel Morgenroth), but is reviled by the young man's racially and socially bigoted mother. The story revolves around whether the two lovers could overcome all barriers and be together. 

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"Peter Alan Tyler, my dad. The most wonderful man in the world. Born 15 September 1954." In a flashback, Rose Tyler's mother Jackie tells a young Rose about her father, Pete, who was killed in a hit-and-run accident while on the way to a friend's wedding in 1987 and died alone. The Doctor takes Rose to the day Pete died so that he is not alone when he dies. Upon their arrival in London in 1987, they witness the accident, but Rose is unable to go to comfort Pete. Going back to try again, Rose suddenly runs out and pushes Pete aside, saving his life. The younger versions of the Doctor and Rose vanish. Later on, he and Rose argue about her actions, with the Doctor rebuking Rose for potentially damaging the timeline. Rose decides to go with Pete to his friend's wedding, while the Doctor walks back to the TARDIS only to find that it is now an empty shell. Strange flying beasts called Reapers appear and begin consuming people. Rose and Pete drive to the wedding together, and the car that was meant to kill Pete appears and nearly collides with their car. A Reaper attacks the wedding guests, including Jackie and an infant Rose. The Doctor runs to the church and directs everyone inside, noting that the age of the church will protect them against the Reapers. The Doctor explains to Rose that her actions have caused a paradox the Reapers are fixing by consuming everyone within it. Feeling that his TARDIS key is still warm, the Doctor sets it up in the middle of the church and the TARDIS slowly begins materialising around it. Pete realises that Rose is his and Jackie's daughter, and when Rose is unable to answer questions about how good a father he was, Pete realises he was meant to die in the accident. Jackie thinks Rose is Pete's daughter with another woman. In a fit of frustration Pete hands the baby Rose to adult Rose. The paradox worsens, and a Reaper is able to enter the church. The Doctor declares himself the oldest thing in the church and offers himself to the Reaper, which consumes him and disappears. The TARDIS key goes cold and drops to the ground. Pete realises that he must die to restore the timeline. He runs in front of the car that was originally meant to kill him; it had continued to appear and disappear on the road just outside the church. After Pete is hit by the car and fatally injured, the timeline is repaired, and the Reapers' victims including the Doctor reappear. The Doctor sends Rose to be with Pete, and she holds his hand until he dies. "Peter Alan Tyler, my dad. The most wonderful man in the world. Died the 7th of November, 1987." 

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In the not-too- distant future, the United States fell like all great empires throughout history. Fifty states were broken into private territories after the Techno- Industrial Civil Wars. Technology and bio-engineering accelerated at such an incredible rate, and forced an industrial competition of corporate espionage. The government tried to keep control of the country by a single thread, but the effect of the giant corporations' white collar wars drove the economy into a tailspin. Neo-Amerika rises as the result of the government bankruptcy and technological companies takeover. To maintain order, The Secret Games Commission (SGC) is formed to organize tournaments deciding which organization gets to control all of Neo-Amerika, leading to the creation of Biological Flying Robotic Enhanced Armored Killing Synthoids (Bio F.R.E.A.K.S.) serving as the champions for each participating organization. 

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New York newspaper reporter Wally Cook (Fredric March) is blamed for reporting a Harlem bootblack Ernest Walker (Troy Brown) as an African nobleman hosting a charity event. Cook claims he was unaware, but he is demoted to writing obituaries. He begs his boss Oliver Stone (Walter Connolly) for another chance, and points out a story about a woman, Hazel Flagg, dying of radium poisoning. Cook is sent to the (fictional) town of Warsaw, Vermont, to interview Flagg (Carole Lombard). Cook finally locates Hazel, who is crying both because her doctor has told her that she is not dying and because she realizes she might be stuck in Vermont for her whole life. Unaware of this, Cook invites Hazel and her doctor to New York as guests of the Morning Star newspaper. The newspaper uses her story to increase its circulation. She receives a ticker tape parade and the key to the city, and becomes an inspiration to many. She and Wally fall in love, and he asks her to marry him even though he still thinks she's dying. After a medical exam by three independent doctors it is finally discovered that Hazel is not really dying, and city officials and Stone decide that it would be better to avoid embarrassment by having it seem that she went off to die, "like an elephant". Hazel and Wally get married and quietly set sail for the tropics. 

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Following the events of the 1996 Doctor Who television movie, the Eighth Doctor picks up a British teenager from 1997, Samantha "Sam" Jones, and later a disaffected drifter in his late twenties named Fitz Kreiner from 1963.The Taint During their adventures, the threesome tangle with the Faction Paradox, a renegade voodoo cult of time travellers who believed in creating time paradoxes and altering history. They also meet the Doctor's old friend Iris Wildthyme, a Time Lady from Gallifrey who travels in a TARDIS shaped like a London double- decker bus. When Sam leaves the TARDIS, the Doctor and Fitz are joined by Compassion, a member of a once-human race called the Remote who slowly begins a conversion process into a living TARDIS.Interference: Book Two The Time Lords, led by his old companion Romana, now President of the High Council, anxious to get their hands on this new TARDIS technology, pursue the Doctor, who loses his own TARDIS and continues to travel using Compassion.The Shadows of Avalon The conflict with Faction Paradox comes to a climax on Gallifrey,The Ancestor Cell where the Doctor discovers his TARDIS in orbit around the planet, transformed into a giant structure of living bone by the Faction. The Doctor, faced with an impossible decision, destroys the Faction and causes major damage to the timeline by apparently wiping his homeworld and his people from history. Much later, it is revealed that four Time Lords had survived the catastrophe: The Doctor, the Master,The Adventuress of Henrietta Street Iris WildthymeFather TimeMad Dogs and Englishmen and Marnal.The Gallifrey Chronicles Meanwhile, having rescued the Doctor from near-death, Compassion leaves the now-amnesiac Doctor on Earth in the late 19th century while she drops Fitz off in 2001 to await the long process of the Doctor's — and the now-embryonic TARDIS's — recovery. She then departs for parts unknown. The Doctor spends the next hundred years travelling the world and living through its history, eventually adopting Miranda, a young girl with two hearts. Miranda leaves the Doctor to face her own destiny in the far future, and the Doctor goes on to meet Fitz as arranged, thanks to a note Compassion slipped into his pocket a century before. Following that, the two are joined by Anji Kapoor, a London stock trader and the three leave Earth in the TARDIS.Escape Velocity Much later, while on Earth in the eighteenth century, the Doctor, Fitz and Anji encounter Sabbath, a Secret Service operative who is aware of time travel and becomes the Doctor's personal nemesis. The Doctor loses his second heart, which was slowly killing him as it was his only link to his now- forgotten homeworld. Sabbath takes the heart and implants it in his own body, tying him and the Doctor together. Through several more adventures, the Doctor and his companions encounter Sabbath again and Trix MacMillan stows away aboard the TARDIS.Time Zero Sabbath subsequently loses the Doctor's time- sensitive heart and the Doctor grows a new one.Camera Obscura The Doctor also begins to recover fragments of his memory, and discovers that Sabbath is working for a group called the Council of Eight. The Council wants to collapse the alternate timelines of the multiverse into one, manageable timeline. To them, the Doctor is a rogue element that needs to be controlled or eliminated. They also begin to eliminate his previous companions from time. Trix comes out of hiding, joining the crew, and Anji leaves the TARDIS.Timeless Sabbath eventually realises that the Council is not human and turns on his masters. Miranda, now a grown woman with a daughter, also returns to help her adopted father defeat the Council, but both she and Sabbath die in the process.Sometime Never... Eventually, the Doctor returns to Earth in 2005 and discovers that another Time Lord, Marnal, has also survived the destruction of Gallifrey. Marnal, who also claims to be the original owner of the Doctor's TARDIS, blames the Doctor for the cataclysm, and takes him and the TARDIS captive while the insectoid alien Vore invade the Earth. After a cold fusion explosion guts the interior of the TARDIS, the Doctor discovers that K-9 Mark II had been aboard all along, with orders from Lady President Romana of Gallifrey to kill him. However, K-9 pauses once it scans the Doctor's mind and discovers the reason why the Doctor has lost his memory. Just prior to destroying Gallifrey, the Doctor (with Compassion's help) downloaded the contents of the Gallifreyan Matrix — the massive computer network containing the mental traces of every Time Lord living and dead — into his brain, with his own memories suppressed to make room for the data. Gallifrey had not actually been erased from history, but an event horizon in relative time prevented anyone from Gallifrey's past to travel beyond Gallifrey's destruction, and vice versa. Both the planet and the Time Lords can be restored, along with the Doctor's memory, if a sufficiently sophisticated computer could be found to reconstruct them. Before that can be done, however, there is the problem of the Vore to contend with. At novel's end, the Doctor, Trix and Fitz are set to confront the Vore invasion force. The restoration of Gallifrey, in time for its second destruction in the Time War prior to the events of the 2005 series has yet to be chronicled. The Eighth Doctor Adventures line ends with The Gallifrey Chronicles. Although one further novel featuring the Eighth Doctor (Fear Itself by Nick Wallace) was published under the Past Doctor Adventures line before BBC Books decided to retire the PDAs as well, that book takes place prior to Timeless. It remains to be seen if the events of The Gallifrey Chronicles will be followed up by any future novel. 

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The Ninth Doctor and Rose follow a time- travelling metal cylinder to London during the Blitz of World War II. Landing about a month after the cylinder, the Doctor tries to track it, while Rose discovers a young boy wearing a gas mask on a nearby roof. Rose climbs on a nearby rope, but she realises too late that the rope is the tethering cable of a barrage balloon, and is carried off the ground. Captain Jack Harkness, a former time agent from the future posing as a Royal Air Force officer, rescues Rose with his camouflaged spaceship before Rose falls from the balloon. Jack mistakes Rose for a potential customer of an object that he is willing to sell. Rose plays along, but insists she needs to discuss the matter with her partner before buying. Meanwhile, the Doctor returns to the TARDIS to find its phone ringing; despite caution from Nancy, a young woman nearby, not to answer it, he does, only to hear the voice of a child asking "Are you my mummy?" He follows Nancy to a house left empty from the recent air raid sirens, where Nancy and some orphaned children eat a meal abandoned by the homeowners. The Doctor tries to learn more from Nancy, but the boy in the gas mask knocks at the door. Nancy orders the children to leave by the back entrance, and warns the Doctor not to touch the boy. The Doctor opens the door anyway, but the child is gone. The Doctor catches up to Nancy and convinces her to give him more information. Nancy reveals that she knew the cylinder fell near a nearby hospital, and its appearance is tied to the boy. The Doctor arrives at the hospital and discovers several patients wearing gas masks fused to their bodies. Dr Constantine, an elderly doctor at the hospital, explains that Jamie, Nancy's brother, was the first patient with this symptom. Suddenly, Constantine changes into another gas mask-wearing person, and the other patients all rise to start chasing the Doctor. Rose and Jack arrive and quickly escape with the Doctor. The Doctor forces Jack to admit that the crashed cylinder is just a Chula medical ship. The three are trapped in a room as the converted patients converge on them, all asking "Are you my mummy?" Nancy, who had returned to the home to get more food, is also cornered by Jamie, the boy, as he reaches out to her. 

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The Ninth Doctor, Rose, and Jack are cornered in a London hospital during the Blitz by patients wearing gas masks fused to their faces asking for their "mummy". The Doctor pretends to be the “mummy” and orders them to go back to their room, and the patients shuffle off. Jamie, the index case of the "epidemic", also responds to this, leaving his sister Nancy alone. The Doctor, Rose, and Jack investigate the hospital room Jamie was treated at, and learn from recordings that the child is growing stronger with its powers and may become unstoppable. Jamie arrives shortly thereafter, having returned to "his room", along with other patients. Jack teleports himself, the Doctor and Rose to Jack's spaceship. The Doctor uses the ship's Chula nanogenes to heal his wounds while learning more about Jack's past. Nancy returns to the site where the cylinder crashed near the hospital on the night Jamie had gained his powers, only to be captured by soldiers. The Doctor, Rose, and Jack return to the site, and discover the guards’ faces transforming into gas mask- wearing people, as the contagion becomes airborne. Examining the cylinder, the remains of a Chula medical ship, the Doctor deduces what has happened: as with Jack's ship, the Chula medical ship carried nanogenes. They had scanned the first human they encountered, Jamie, who died that night, and presumed it was a template for all humans, transforming them into the gas mask-wearing people. Meanwhile, the transformed humans approach the cylinder. The Doctor realises that Jamie is the template controlling all these humans, searching for his "mummy", and that Nancy is not Jamie's sister but his mother. The Doctor convinces Nancy to tell Jamie she is Jamie's mother. Nancy accepts Jamie into her arms; the nanogenes gather around the two, determine that Nancy is Jamie's parent and that her DNA is the proper template for humans. The Doctor directs the nanogenes to undo their previous transformations, returning everyone to normal, including restoring Jamie to life. The bomb prop, on display at a Doctor Who exhibition A German bomb approaches the site. Jack returns to his ship and uses it to tether the bomb and steer it away from Earth. The Doctor orders everyone to flee the area, setting the Chula medical ship to self- destruct to destroy the technical parts without changing the timeline. Jack is unable to stop the bomb or escape from it, but the Doctor comes to rescue Jack, who joins the Doctor and Rose in the TARDIS. At the end of the episode, the Doctor and Rose dance to 'In the Mood' by Glenn Miller. 

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The plans for the new nuclear power plant, on display at a Doctor Who exhibition. The Ninth Doctor lands the TARDIS in Cardiff, using the energy of the Cardiff Rift to recharge the engines of the time machine. Mickey joins the Doctor, Rose, and Jack for lunch. The Doctor spots a newspaper article showing Margaret Blaine, a Slitheen, has become Cardiff's new mayor. The four track down and capture Blaine to find out what she is doing there. The Doctor observes Blaine's scale model plans for a new nuclear power plant, but identifies that it is purposely flawed to cause a meltdown that would open the Cardiff Rift and destroy the Earth. He also discovers the model contains an "extrapolator" that Blaine would have used to flee the Earth. The Doctor decides to take Blaine back to her home planet of Raxacoricofallapatorius, but she reveals that she has received a death sentence there and will be executed upon returning. The Doctor agrees to her final request to accompany her to a dinner meal. Blaine makes several half-hearted attempts to kill the Doctor but he easily avoids them. She then asks him to take her to another planet instead. Jack begins integrating the extrapolator into the TARDIS to speed up the engine recharge. Rose and Mickey hang out together, and he claims to her that he is dating someone else because she is not there for him. Before Rose can answer whether she will come back to Mickey, Cardiff is struck by a large earthquake that is coming from the Rift. The Doctor, Blaine, Rose, and Jack regroup and find that the extrapolator was a trap meant to redirect the energy from the TARDIS into the Rift, rupturing it. Jack and the Doctor are unable to stop the energy transfer, and Blaine takes Rose hostage and demands the extrapolator. The heart of the TARDIS opens on the console, bathing Blaine in light. While she is captivated by the light, Jack and the Doctor close the rift and disable the extrapolator. As the console closes, they find that Blaine's human suit is empty except for an egg. The Doctor surmises that the TARDIS sensed that Blaine wanted a second chance at life and gave it to her. The TARDIS crew decides to return the egg to Raxacoricofallapatorius so Blaine can be raised in a different family. Rose realises Mickey has left without saying goodbye. She runs out to look for him, but finds he has gone. 

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The 'Anne Droid', on display at the Doctor Who Experience. The Ninth Doctor, Rose, and Jack find themselves separated, waking up with temporary amnesia in various television game shows which are more fatal than their twenty-first century counterparts. On The Weakest Link and Big Brother, losing contestants are disintegrated. On What Not to Wear, participants undergo brutal cosmetic surgery. The Doctor escapes Big Brother with a contestant called Lynda, and Jack escapes What Not to Wear. The Doctor discovers that they are on the space station Satellite Five, now known as "The Game Station", in the year 200,100. The station is now under the control of the Bad Wolf Corporation, which shares the name with a set of words that are following the Doctor and Rose through time and space. Lynda explains that 100 years ago, when the Doctor last visited, Satellite Five stopped broadcasting and humanity became confused and lost. The three search for Rose. They find her just as she loses the final round of The Weakest Link and is promptly disintegrated by the Anne Droid. The Doctor, Jack, and Lynda are arrested, but escape their capture and travel to the control room on Floor 500. There they meet the Controller, a cybernetic human. The Controller uses the cover of a solar flare to speak directly to the Doctor, telling him that her masters cannot hear her during the flare. The Controller used a teleport called a transmat to hide the Doctor and his companions in the games as her masters do not watch them. The solar flare ends before she can tell the Doctor who is controlling her. Jack finds the TARDIS hidden in a restricted area, which he uses to figure out that contest losers are not actually disintegrated but transmatted off the station. The Controller begins giving the Doctor the coordinates that the transmat leads to, knowing that her masters will hear. The Controller disappears in a transmat beam and wakes up on a spaceship, where she is killed by her masters. Rose wakes up on the floor of a spaceship and is horrified to see a Dalek approaching her. The Doctor and Jack discover a signal coming from the station that is hiding something at the edge of the solar system. They cancel the signal and reveal a fleet of Dalek spaceships. The Daleks open a communication channel to the Doctor, threatening to kill Rose if he interferes. The Doctor refuses to back down and vows to rescue Rose and wipe out the Daleks. 

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The Ninth Doctor uses the extrapolator on the TARDIS to generate a protective shield around it as he materialises the TARDIS around Rose to rescue her from the Daleks. The Doctor discovers the Daleks' Emperor survived the Time War and escaped to Earth in a crippled ship, where he rebuilt the Dalek race by harvesting DNA material from humanity. Returning to Satellite Five, Captain Jack uses the extrapolator to shield the top six floors of the station and sets up defensive positions. The Doctor attempts to create a delta wave generator which will destroy the Daleks, but also life on Earth. The Doctor tricks Rose into going inside the TARDIS, and uses his sonic screwdriver to direct the TARDIS to return Rose to her home time to keep her safe. The Daleks invade the station, exterminating everyone in their path. After being returned home, Rose begins to notice the words "Bad Wolf" - words which also exist on Satellite Five - and realises that they are a message rather than a warning. She convinces Mickey and Jackie to help her open the heart of the TARDIS. Mickey uses a truck borrowed by Jackie to pull the panel on the console open and Rose is bathed in the light of the TARDIS. The TARDIS doors slam on Mickey and Jackie as they try to enter, and it then dematerialises. The Daleks reach the top of Satellite Five, exterminating Jack and Lynda in the process. They file into the control room while the Doctor contemplates firing the delta wave, eventually deciding he cannot do it. Before the Daleks can kill the Doctor, Rose arrives in the TARDIS, wrapped in the glow of the time vortex. She declares that she is the "Bad Wolf", spreading the words “Bad Wolf” throughout time and space as a message to lead her there. Rose disintegrates the Dalek fleet. The Doctor begs her to relinquish her new power, but instead she resurrects Jack. Rose begins to suffer the effects of the power, and the Doctor kisses her, absorbing the entire power of the vortex into his own body to save her life. He releases it back into the TARDIS and carries an unconscious Rose back inside. They leave in the TARDIS before Jack can get back to them. As a result of absorbing the energy of the time vortex, every cell in the Doctor's body begins to die. He then regenerates into the Tenth Doctor. The Emperor Dalek, as shown at the Doctor Who Experience. 

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Set on the fictional San Piedro Island in the northern Puget Sound region of the state of Washington coast in 1954, the plot revolves around a murder case in which Kabuo Miyamoto, a Japanese American, is accused of killing Carl Heine, a respected fisherman in the close-knit community. Much of the story is told in flashbacks explaining the interaction of the various characters over the prior decades. Carl's body had been pulled from the sea, trapped in his own net, on September 16, 1954. His water-damaged watch had stopped at 1:47. The trial, held in December 1954 during a snowstorm that grips the entire island, occurs in the midst of deep anti-Japanese sentiments following World War II. Covering the case is the editor of the town's one-man newspaper, the San Piedro Review, Ishmael Chambers, a World War II US Marine Corps veteran who lost an arm fighting the Japanese at the Battle of Tarawa while watching his friends die. Torn by a sense of hatred for the Japanese, Chambers struggles with his love for Kabuo's wife, Hatsue, and his conscience, wondering if Kabuo is truly innocent. Through extended flashbacks, the reader learns that Ishmael had fallen in love with Hatsue when the two attended high school together right before the war. They had been secretly dating at this time and lost their virginity to each other. Spearheading the prosecution are the town's sheriff, Art Moran, and prosecutor, Alvin Hooks. Leading the defense is the old, experienced Nels Gudmondsson. Several witnesses, including Etta Heine, Carl's mother, accuse Kabuo of murdering Carl for racial and personal reasons. Kabuo Miyamoto (a decorated war veteran of the Japanese- American 442nd Regimental Combat Team), experienced prejudice because of his ancestry, following the Imperial Japanese Navy's attack on Pearl Harbor. He accepts the murder trial as a kind of karma for his part in killing young Germans during the war. Also involved in the trial are Horace Whaley, the town coroner, and Ole Jurgensen, an elderly man who sells his strawberry field to Carl. The strawberry field is contested in the trial. The land was originally owned by Carl Heine Sr. The Miyamotos lived in a house on the Heines' land and picked strawberries for Mr. Heine. Kabuo and Carl Heine Jr. were close friends as children. Kabuo's father eventually approached Heine Sr. about purchasing of the farm. Though Etta opposed the sale, Carl Sr. agreed. The payments were to be made over a ten-year period. However, before the last payment was made, war erupted between the US and Japan following Pearl Harbor, and all islanders of Japanese ancestry were forced to relocate to internment camps. Hatsue and her family, the Imadas, are interned in Manzanar camp in California. Under some pressure from her mother, Hatsue breaks up with Ishmael through a Dear John letter and marries Kabuo while at Manzanar. Ishmael's last thoughts before passing out on a navy hospital ship when his arm is amputated at the Battle of Tarawa are of anger towards Hatsue. In 1944, Carl Sr. died due to a heart attack and Etta Heine sold the land to Jurgensen. When Kabuo returned after the war, he was extremely bitter towards Etta for reneging on the land sale. When Jurgensen suffered a stroke and decided to sell the farm, he was approached by Carl Heine Jr., hours before Kabuo arrived to try to buy the land back. During the trial, the disputed land is presented as a family feud and the motivation behind Carl's murder. Ishmael's search of the maritime records at Point White lighthouse station reveals that on the night that Carl Heine died, a freighter, the SS West Corona, had passed through the channel where Carl had been fishing at 1:42 a.m., just five minutes before his watch had stopped. Ishmael realizes that Carl was likely to have been thrown overboard by the force of the freighter's wake. Despite the bitterness he feels as Hatsue's rejected lover, Ishmael comes forward with the new information. Further evidence is collected in support of the conclusion that Carl had climbed the boat's mast to cut down a lantern, been knocked from the mast by the freighter's wake, hit his head, then fallen into the sea. The charges against Kabuo Miyamoto are dismissed. Hatsue thanks Ishmael, whom she had avoided since marrying Kabuo, and Ishmael is finally able to let his love of Hatsue go, whilst his agnosticism hardens into atheism. 

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Stephen, a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran, returns from a mental hospital, which he entered voluntarily because he was suffering from nightmares about the war and had in consequence lost three jobs in a row. After having been treated and finally coming home again, he gets a new job as custodial engineer at a grammar school, but loses it again within less than one week because of a law forbidding people who spent time in a mental hospital to work within the vicinity of children. However, the Simmons family desperately needs money, so Stephen continues looking for work, and finds a job picking potatoes. There he makes friends with a man called Moe Henry, with whose help he succeeds in obtaining a job working in a mine - his best one yet. In the meantime, the twins Lidia and Stu try to get away from the dreary reality of their lives. They find a tree in a forest close to their house and decide to build a tree house there. At first they and their friends argue over who has to construct it and who is allowed to use it; the three boys - Stu, Chet and Marsh - want it all to themselves, while the girls - Lidia, Elvadine and Amber - want them to work on it and share it afterwards. After several deals, they agree to build the tree house together. The girls get everything they need from the garbage heap belonging to the Lipnickis, a neighboring family with a reputation for bullying, who have a grudge against the Simmons and their friends. Unfortunately Billy, the youngest of the Lipnicki kids, discovers Lidia, Elvadine and Amber on his father's territory, so the girls have to pay him to keep quiet, but later after he falls under a candy coma his brothers force him to betray Lidia's secret. While the children are busy building their tree house, Stephen and Moe are caught in a collapse as they drain water out of a cavern. Moe is caught under falling rubble, but Stephen, who in Vietnam had to leave his best friend to die in order to be rescued himself, is determined to save him, even if it costs him his own life. He frees Moe, but is hit by falling rocks himself, and though the two men are both rescued, Stephen is badly hurt and comatose, being put on life-support in the hospital. While Stu and Lidia fear for their father's life, the Lipnickis find the treehouse and take it over, stealing the lock and key, which belonged to Stephen. However, they agree to return them if Stu can win a bet - swimming a lap around the inside of a water-tower while it drains - which he does. The children can keep the place, but not before the Lipnickis throw the key onto the rotted, treacherous roof of the water-tower, telling Stu that if he wants it, he can get it back himself. Shortly afterwards, their father is taken off life-support, and dies. When the kids run away from home to the tree house, they discover that the Lipnickis have returned. In the fight that erupts between them, the tree house is destroyed. Meanwhile, Billy Lipnicki protests against all the fighting, asking why they can't share the fort, but is ignored. He takes it on himself to go to the water tower to retrieve the key, but the roof caves in just as Stu and the others find him, and he almost drowns in the water tower. Stu rescues and resuscitates him together with Lidia, and Billy tells them he saw an angel, one who "looked like [Stu,] only bigger," (implied to be Stephen) who told him he had to stay on Earth and take care of his family. From that time on the Lipnickis stop fighting with the others and stay out of their way, except for Billy, who becomes a good friend to them. The twins and their friends start to rebuild the tree house, but give it up after a couple of days due to lack of interest. Also, they find out that their father bought them a new house before he died and are happy to have a proper home again at last. 

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Set on the fictional San Piedro Island in the northern Puget Sound region of the Washington state coast in 1950, the plot revolves around the murder case of Kabuo Miyamoto (Rick Yune), a Japanese American accused of killing Carl Heine, a White fisherman. The trial occurs in the midst of deep anti-Japanese sentiments following World War II. Covering the case is the editor of the town's one-man newspaper, Ishmael Chambers (Ethan Hawke), a World War II veteran who lost an arm fighting the Japanese in the Pacific War. Ishmael struggles with his childhood, and continuing, love for Kabuo's wife, Hatsue (Youki Kudoh), and his conscience, wondering if Kabuo is truly innocent. Spearheading the prosecution are the town's sheriff, Art Moran (Richard Jenkins), and prosecutor, Alvin Hooks (James Rebhorn). Leading the defense is the old, experienced attorney Nels Gudmundsson (Max von Sydow). An underlying theme throughout the trial is prejudice. Several witnesses, including Etta Heine (Celia Weston), Carl's mother, accuse Kabuo of murdering Carl for racial and personal reasons. This stance is not without irony, as Kabuo (a decorated war veteran of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team), experienced prejudice because of his ancestry, following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. By the same standard, Etta, a German American, could be blamed for Nazi war crimes. Also involved in the trial is Ole Jurgensen, an elderly man who sold his strawberry field to Carl. The strawberry field is a contested issue during the trial. The land was originally owned by Carl Heine Sr. The Miyamotos lived in a house on the Heines' land and picked strawberries for Carl Sr. Kabuo and Carl Jr. were close friends as children. Kabuo's father, Zenhichi, eventually approached Carl Sr. about purchasing of the farm. Though Etta opposed the sale, Carl Sr. agreed. The payments were to be made over a ten-year period. However, before the last payment was made, war erupted between the U.S. and Japan, and all islanders of Japanese ancestry were forced to relocate to internment camps. In 1944, Carl Sr. died and Etta sold the land to Ole. When Kabuo returned after the war, he was extremely bitter toward Etta for reneging on the land sale. When Ole suffered a stroke and decided to sell the farm, he was approached by Carl Jr., hours before Kabuo arrived, to try to buy the land back. During the trial, the land is presented as a family feud and the motivation behind Carl's murder. Ishmael's search of the maritime records reveals on the night that Carl Heine died a freighter had passed through the channel where Carl had been fishing at 1:42am, five minutes before his watch had stopped. Ishmael realizes that Carl was thrown overboard by the force of the freighter's wake. Despite the bitterness he feels at Hatsue's rejection, Ishmael comes forward with the new information. Further evidence is collected in support of the conclusion that Carl had climbed the boat's mast to cut down a lantern, been knocked from the mast by the freighter's wake, hit his head on his boat's gunwale, then fallen into the sea. The charges against Kabuo are dismissed. Hatsue thanks Ishmael by allowing him to hold her "one last time." 

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The Griswald family competes in a game show called Pig in a Poke and wins an all-expenses-paid trip to Europe. In a whirlwind tour of western Europe, chaos of all sorts ensues. They stay in a fleabag London hotel with a sloppy, tattooed Cockney desk clerk. While in their English rental car, a yellow Austin Maxi, Clark's tendency to drive on the wrong side of the road causes frequent accidents, including knocking over a bicyclist, who reappears throughout the film. Later, Clark drives the family around the busy Lambeth Bridge roundabout for hours, unable to maneuver his way out of the chaotic traffic. At Stonehenge, Clark accidentally backs the car into an ancient stone monolith, toppling all the stones like dominoes, which they do not even notice as they happily leave the scene. In Paris, the family wears stenciled berets, causing Rusty to be teased by young women at the Eiffel Tower observation deck. Clark offers to get rid of the beret for Rusty, but when he throws it away, another visitor's dachshund mistakes it for a Frisbee and jumps off the tower after it, landing safely in a nearby pond. The family's video camera is stolen by a passerby whom Clark had asked to take a picture of the family. Clark is also mocked by a French waiter for his terrible French. Later, Clark and Ellen visit a bawdy Paris can-can dance show, finding Rusty already there with a prostitute. Next, in a West German village, the Griswalds burst in on a bewildered elderly couple, whom they mistakenly think are relatives but the couple ends up providing them dinner and lodging anyway, each family not being able to understand the other's language. Clark turns a lively Bavarian folk dance stage performance into an all-out street brawl, after which, while fleeing, he hastily knocks down several street vendors' stands and gets their Citroën DS stuck in a narrow medieval archway. In Rome, the Griswalds rent a car at a travel office, but unknown to them, the men in charge are thieves, holding the real manager captive. The lead thief gives them a car with the manager in the trunk, claiming he lost the trunk keys. The next day Ellen is shocked to discover that private, sexy videos of her from the family's stolen video camera have been used in a billboard advertising porn, leaving her completely humiliated. After screaming angrily at Clark (who had told her he had erased the video), Ellen storms off to their hotel, where she encounters the thief who rented them the car. She confesses her recent troubles, still unaware that he is a criminal. The man then tries to get the car keys, which are in her purse, but fails. When the police arrive at the hotel, he kidnaps Ellen, prompting Clark to rescue her. On the flight home, Clark falls into the pilot's room and accidentally causes the plane to knock the Statue of Liberty's torch upside down. 

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The film continues a few months after the end of the TV series. The main character Detective Sergeant Shunsaku Aoshima has worked his way back up into the investigative division of the Wangan Precinct of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, after being demoted back to patrol duty for insubordination. Shortly after the movie begins, a body is found floating in a river near the edge of the precinct's jurisdiction. However, in the spirit of the series, the main concern of the officers on the scene is getting to the body before their counterparts from the other precinct on the other side of the river get to it. The scene eventually degenerates into a cross-river shouting match over bullhorns between the officers from the two precincts. The brass at Wangan Station turn out to be less than happy when their officers manage to recover the body (which has had a teddy bear crudely stuffed into its stomach) as it would require a special investigation, which would drain more from the station's already tight budget. At the same time, the station is in an uproar as officers find that someone has been stealing the receipts for on the job expenses that they had originally intended to file for reimbursement. Things are further complicated when the Assistant Commissioner is kidnapped and the investigative team from Metropolitan Police headquarters moves into Wangan Station. The investigation is led by Superintendent Shinji Muroi, whom Aoshima befriended in the TV series. Having promised Aoshima that he would try to reform the bureaucratic mess within the police department and force the local and headquarters officers to work together as equals, Muroi finds that his promise increasingly hard to keep as his decisions are continuously overruled from above by superiors who insist on playing everything by the book. It becomes apparent that Muroi's superiors are setting him up to take the fall in the event the investigation fails. The stratification in the department becomes apparent when the investigators from headquarters immediately delegate the most menial of tasks to the local officers, while receiving special treatment enjoying gourmet bentos while the locals are forced to dine on instant ramen. The locals are forced to work multiple cases at the same time, and find themselves berated by their superiors when mistakes are inevitably made. The film goes on to take on issues such as disaffected youth unable to differentiate between reality and video games, overprotective parents, strange internet subcultures; and on more lighthearted notes, the lack of sidearms, otaku obsessed with cosplay, media frenzies, and even overtly melodramatic movie scenes, as Aoshima and his fellow officers continue to press on through the absurdity. 

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The Fall of the Mutants consists of three separate non-intersecting storylines: one involving the X-Men, one involving X-Factor, and the other concerning the New Mutants. 

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During a visit from her daughter, Niki, Etsuko reflects on her own life as a young woman in Japan, and how she left that country to live in England. As she describes it, she and her Japanese husband, Jiro, had a daughter together, and a few years later Etsuko met a British man and moved with him to England. She took her elder daughter, Keiko, to England to live with her and the new husband. When Etsuko and her new husband have a daughter, Etsuko wants to call her something "modern" and her husband wants an Eastern-sounding name, so they compromise with the name "Niki," which seems to Etsuko to be perfectly British, but sounds to her husband at least slightly Japanese. In England, Keiko becomes increasingly solitary and antisocial. Etsuko recalls how, as Keiko grew older, she would lock herself in her room and emerge only to pick up the dinner-plate that her mother would leave for her in the kitchen. This disturbing behavior ends, as the reader already has learned, in Keiko's suicide. "Your father," Etsuko tells Niki, "was rather idealistic at times...[H]e really believed we could give her a happy life over here... But you see, Niki, I knew all along. I knew all along she wouldn't be happy over here."Kazuo Ishiguro, A Pale View of Hills, pp.176 Etsuko tells her daughter, Niki, that she had a friend in Japan named Sachiko. Sachiko had a daughter named Mariko, a girl whom Etsuko's memory paints as exceptionally solitary and antisocial. Sachiko, Etsuko recalls, had planned to take Mariko to America with an American soldier identified only as "Frank." Clearly, Sachiko's story bears striking similarities to Etsuko's. 

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The player controls Master Higgins (known as Takahashi Meijin in the Japanese version), a young man who ventured to Adventure Island in the South Pacific after hearing that the Evil Witch Doctor kidnapped Princess Tina. To rescue her, Higgins must survive a series of 32 stages. There are eight worlds called "areas", which are divided into four stages or "rounds" each, which are further divided into four checkpoints. When the player reaches the fourth round of each area, he must confront a boss at the end to continue to the next area. The game is completed when the player saves the girl after defeating the eighth and final form of the evil lord. 

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Brian Kelly is an underachieving high school student in Orange County, California. An avid skateboarder, Brian is frequently at odds with his parents for his increasingly reckless behavior, which has landed him in jail on more than one occasion. The only person in the family Brian can relate to is his adopted Vietnamese brother Vinh, who works as a shipping clerk for the Vietnamese Anti-Communist Relief Fund (VACRF), an organization which sends medical supplies to Vietnam. When Vinh discovers a suspicious inaccuracy in VACRF's shipping records, he brings it to his boss Colonel Trac, who dismisses the matter as a clerical error, then fires Vinh when he tries to investigate. Undeterred, Vinh sneaks into Westpac Medical Supplies, the warehouse handling VACRF's shipping, but is apprehended by owner Ed Lawndale. Vinh is interrogated by Lawndale and Bobby Nguyen, another of Colonel Trac's employees, at a motel. When Colonel Trac arrives, it is revealed that he and Lawndale are conspirators in a scheme to smuggle illegal weapons to Vietnam. Convinced that Vinh poses no threat to their operation, Trac intends to set him free, but Vinh is strangled to death by Nguyen. They hang Vinh's body from a noose, so the police deem it a suicide. After the funeral, Brian finds the list of medical supplies Vinh was investigating, written in Vietnamese. Looking for someone to translate it, he encounters Bobby Nguyen who starts to follow him. Brian sneaks into the backseat of Nguyen’s car and witnesses a meeting with Trac and Lawndale, in which Nguyen demands $50,000 and a ticket to Bangkok, but a struggle ensues and Lawndale kills Nguyen. Brian flees to notify the police, but they find no trace of the crime and later learn that Nguyen supposedly arrived in Thailand. Brian tries to convince Detective Al Lucero that his brother did not commit suicide. While skeptical, Lucero offers to look into it. As Brian's suspicion of Colonel Trac grows, he reaches out to Trac's daughter Tina, a fellow high school student and Vinh's ex-girlfriend. After an image makeover, Brian asks her out on a date and the two become closer. He attends one of VACRF's social functions, where he notices Lawndale and learns of his connection to Trac and Westpac. Following in his brother's footsteps, Brian sneaks into Lawndale's warehouse and uncovers a shipping crate full of weapons. Brian causes an explosion at the warehouse and plants evidence to incriminate Trac, but Lucero immediately suspects Brian and admonishes him for the act. However, the incident causes Trac to panic and send his wife and daughter away to his brother's house. A distressed Tina spends the night with Brian instead and discovers a lighter belonging to her father in Brian's room, leading Brian to explain all his suspicions to her. Tina angrily confronts her father about the conspiracy, who is shamed by his involvement and contacts Lawndale to end the operation. In response, Lawndale sends a group of Vietnamese motorcyclists to run Brian down on the street. The police manage to apprehend the bikers and, with the aid of an interpreter, Lucero is able to confirm Lawndale's role in the attack. Brian visits his friend Yabbo, who builds a newer, faster skateboard for Brian and rallies the rest of the skateboarding clique. Brian and the police both converge upon Colonel Trac's house, where Lawndale holds Tina at gunpoint. When Trac tries to wrestle the gun away, Brian crashes into the room through the window, but Lawndale shoots and kills Trac then escapes in a police car. Brian, Lucero, and the entire skateboarding crew eventually corner Lawndale. As Lawndale prepares to shoot Brian, he soars into the air on his skateboard and knocks Lawndale out. Brian comforts Tina about her father's death and suggests that they return to school together, implying that their relationship will continue. Afterwards, Brian and Lucero visit Vinh's grave before driving away. 

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By offering up the blood of a lamb, Silvia, the protagonist of Upon the Dull Earth, is able to summon creatures she identifies as angels. She thinks that the creatures are her ancestors, and she is sure that one day she will join them. At the same time, though, it is not clear whether the creatures are really good, as Silvia thinks, or wicked. Their behavior and their relation with Silvia scare the girl's relatives and Rick, her boyfriend. Rick thinks that Silvia's behavior is very dangerous, as "the white-winged giants ... can sear [her] to ash". During a quarrel with Rick, the girl accidentally cuts herself. Independently from her will, Silvia's blood summons the creatures. Unable to control their power, the angel-like giants burn Silvia's body and leave only "a brittle burned-out husk". Unable to accept his lover's death, Rick tries to bring Silvia back, but in doing so he causes the degeneration and destruction of the world he lives in. The story also develops one of Dick's favorite themes, namely the definition of what is real. The reality we think we know well turns out to be insubstantial, due to Dick's use of multiple possible realities which ends up deconstructing the idea of reality itself. As the short story investigates these questions, first at an epistemological level and then at an ontological one, Upon the Dull Earth unfolds like a conventional horror plot. Rick manages to contact the light- creatures who apparently belong to a higher realm of being and he also manages to speak with Silvia. The girl now lives in the realm of the angel-like creatures, but she wants to come back and she explains that they made a mistake when they took her away. The creatures think that bringing Silvia back could be dangerous. Besides, Silvia explains that in order to come back she needs "some shape to enter" because there are no "material forms" in the higher continuum. She would have to take something from the human world, "something of clay". At the end of the story, Silvia manages to come back, but the effects of her return are disastrous. As soon as she appears in front of Rick, Silvia realizes that something has gone wrong and that she has taken the place of someone else. In fact, she has taken her sister's body. There is a scene in which Rick sees Betty Lou (Silvia's sister) change and become Silvia, but it is just the beginning of the nightmare atmosphere which engulfs the story's ending. In fact, the process of transformation is not over. Slowly, every member of Silvia's family becomes Silvia. Rick runs away in a fright, but his body is destined to be invaded by Silvia, too. The girl has assumed the role of a revenant who invades the body and mind of any living person and spreads like a virus, a curse, leaving no hope for redemption. At the end of the story, after a useless flight, after he has seen service-station attendants, waitresses and common people change into Silvia before his very eyes, Rick looks at himself in a mirror and sees his face slowly becoming Silvia's. Suddenly, the man is gone and only Silvia remains. The girl finds herself alone and does not understand what has happened. 

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The film begins with two cars racing in the middle of the desert. Biker Cary Ford (Martin Henderson) pulls up on his motorcycle and tries to pass them. He finally does so and stops at a diner owned by his ex-girlfriend Shane (Monet Mazur). There are pictures all over the wall of Ford and Shane back when they were together. Ford takes one of the pictures. He then goes back outside and the two street racers who didn't let him pass arrive. The three get into a fight but Ford beats up both of them before letting them go. Next Ford meets up with his two best friends Dalton (Jay Hernandez) and Val (Will Yun Lee) and they take a ride back to town to see a motorcycle party. Ford sees Shane and the two begin conversing, with Shane saying that she is mad that Ford left. A biker gang called the Hellions pulls up which consists of Henry James (Matt Schulze) the leader, his girlfriend China (Jamie Pressly) and his right-hand man Luther (Max Beesley) . Henry is pissed at Ford for stealing his bikes (which contain drugs) while Ford reasons by saying that he stole the bikes to pay off bills. The Hellions leave and Ford, Dalton and Val all take a ride on their bikes. Another biker gang friends with the Hellions pull up. The black biker gang called the Reapers, consisting of Trey (Ice Cube) the leader and his brother Junior (Fredro Starr), threaten Ford to stop stealing bikes. Ford and his friends arrive at a nightclub where tons of biker gangs hang out. The three gangs run into each other and cause a big brawl. A scared Junior runs into the bathroom to find the Hellions there. Junior apologizes to Henry for not being able to pay him back for a botched drug deal (which Trey refused to allow earlier) and begs Henry to give him some time to work it out. Henry refuses and kills Junior by strangling him to death with a bike chain. Ford, Shane and the two friends go back to a motel to spend the night, where Ford and Shane normalize their relationship a bit. At the murder scene where Junior was found dead, two FBI agents, Henderson (Justina Machado) and her partner, Jay McPherson (Adam Scott) show up, assuring Trey that they will take care of the case and find Junior's killer. China becomes a false witness to Junior's death and gives a statement that Cary Ford killed Junior, hearing which a vengeful Trey swears to kill Ford. At a diner Shane sees on the TV that Ford is wanted for Junior's murder. Shane tells Ford and the four leave the diner and hit the road. The Reapers pull up at the diner and a high speed chase ensues with all riding into a forest full of palm trees. Ford tells Shane and the friends to split up. Ford rides out of the forest into a desert drawing Trey, resulting in the chase being led near a passenger train. Ford jumps up onto the train and Trey follows riding on top of the train and going inside the passenger cars. In the struggle, Trey slips and falls in front of the train with his leg getting caught on the tracks. Ford helps him out, gives him his own bike to escape leaving Trey puzzled. Shane, Dalton and Val meet up with Ford and the four find a cave for the night to stay. Ford talks it out with his friends and says that he should call the FBI agents to tell them that he is innocent. Ford calls them and McPherson picks up the phone. He says that he doesn't believe Ford but Henderson does. Next morning the four leave the cave and hitch a ride inside a truck. The truck is stopped by police checkpoint and just before the agents open the back of the truck, Ford and Shane bust out of the truck in a race car with the two friends on their bikes. The four drive onto a highway with the two FBI agents and Trey on their tail. The scene shifts to a highway as Ford jumps out of the car onto Val's bike and tells him to ride with Shane. Trey and the two agents follow. The agents survive a crash where their black Hummer hits a construction pipe. Trey rides his bike into Ford's and the two crash. Holding Trey at gunpoint, Ford explains to Trey that he did not kill Junior. Not wanting to believe him, Trey asks who the real killer is. Ford says that it was Henry and that he set them both up. Willing to take a leap of faith, Trey agrees to partner with Ford as he sets up a meeting with the agents. At Shane's garage, Ford calls Shane and tells her that he wants her, Val and Dalton to come and meet him and Trey there. Subsequently, the two FBI agents bust in and tell Trey and Ford to get down. Henderson asks for an explanation since she believes Ford is innocent and as he tells them, McPherson turns and shoots Henderson, apparently killing her. McPherson reveals himself as Henry's mole in the agency and that he is working with the Hellions after making a deal with him. Henry, China and Luther show up with Dalton and Val in chains and Shane as hostage. Ford says that Henry can take the bikes back but Henry wants to kill Ford and Trey (after admitting to Trey that he had killed Junior). Thereafter, a big fight scene begins with Trey killing Luther by hanging him with a chain and Henry and China leaving the garage. Ford frees Shane while Trey unties Val and Dalton and they leave the garage. Just before they do Henderson (who was wearing a bullet proof vest) blows up the garage killing McPherson. Outside of the garage, China meets up with Shane and the two fight on their bikes. The fight ends with Shane kicking China off her bike and throwing her through a car windshield, killing her. Finally, Ford catches up with Henry on the street in a bike chase. Henry shoots at the gas of Ford's (MTT Turbine Superbike) causing gas to leak from it. Henry's subsequent shots cause the gas trail to light up. Ford soars through the air and lands on top of Henry's bike, the fire catches up to them both causing both bike's to explode throwing Ford in the air and killing Henry. Shane picks him up and they drive back to the garage to find the others. It is also revealed that Henderson survived but is injured. Ford and Shane get back together and decide that the four need a vacation (with Shane suggesting Mexico). Val picks up his girlfriend Nina (Christina Milian) and from a distance we see the five ride off in the desert as the screen fades to black and the credits roll. 

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A mostly- deserted island, which is believed to be the home to the fountain of youth, is off the coast of Florida. The island gets some visitors in the form of a teenage boy band, "the Wild Ones" led by Jordan Christopher, and their gang of swimsuit-clad young people, who head there in a crowded powerboat ostensibly for a scavenger hunt. However, they spend about half their screen time crooning to each other, or dancing on the beach. The island's wealthy owner, Wellington (Brian Donlevy) recruits his blonde bombshell daughter, Junior (Jayne Mansfield), to remove the teenagers from the island. Junior is eager to see her love interest (and the island's only resident), rotund toupee-wearing botanist Irving (Jack E. Leonard). However, Irving is more interested in flowers and his bicycle than in the amorous Junior. Wellington asks Irving to spy on the teenagers, which he does by donning a sweatshirt that reads "Fink University", and "getting their trust" by joining them in dancing the Turtle. Meanwhile, Irving's twin brother Herman (also Jack E. Leonard, without a toupee), Wellington's trusted employee, plots with his love interest, the scheming harridan Camille Salamander (Phyllis Diller) to find the fountain of youth first. 

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In the surveillance-style video, a male office worker in his cubicle is becoming increasingly irritated with the computer. He slaps the monitor in frustration, punches the keyboard before using it like a baseball bat to knock the monitor off of the desk. His neighbor peers over the partition twice in curiosity. The video ends with the protagonist kicking the monitor out of his cubicle. 

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After experiencing a terrifying explosion, a middle-class American family finds their home in the middle of a wasteland. American soldiers burst in looking for survivors and supplies, under the family's amazed and frightened eyes. The soldiers are just as surprised, finding the home filled with items that are no longer available, and carrying away their food. The soldiers explain that their home is one of the few to survive the ongoing nuclear war, which is now largely automated with underground factories on both sides of the conflict building missiles and destroying the other country square by square. The soldiers and family soon realize the home is out of its own time continuum, apparently having been blasted into the future by the force of the bombs. They find that the date is not long in the future; the war starts shortly after the time they left. The soldiers tell the family a second wave of missiles will be arriving, intended to destroy anything that survived the first wave, and offer to take the family into a shelter. After some discussion, they refuse, considering it better to chance that the second wave will blast them back to their own time than live in this largely lifeless future. The gambit succeeds and the family finds themselves in their own time, but with their house destroyed. Neighbors rush to the home, where the father, Tim McLean, agrees that the problem was an exploding central heating system. Then he comments, "I should have got it fixed ... I should have had it looked at a long time ago. Before it got in such bad shape ... before it was too late", a metaphor for the start of the war which may now be avoidable. 

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Pretty Face is a romantic comedy that involves a variety of different characters. The main protagonist is Masashi Rando, a high school student and karate expert who harbors an unconfessed love for a fellow student, Rina Kurimi. One day, while returning home from a karate tournament in Hokkaidō, he is involved in a tragic school bus accident and burned beyond recognition. One year later, Masashi awakes from a coma to find that he's been in the care of a talented (yet slightly deranged) surgeon named Jun Manabe. Masashi finds out his disfigured face had been reconstructed in the image of the girl he has a crush on. Not knowing what Masashi originally looked like, Dr. Manabe used a photo in Masashi's pocket as the model for his reconstructive surgery. Afterwards, Masashi finds out that during his year long coma, he was mistakenly pronounced deceased, his parents moved away, and even his house was demolished. Once he has realized his old life is now gone, he breaks down in complete despair on the sidewalk in front of the empty lot that was his former household. On his way back to Manabe's clinic, he runs into Rina by chance, and is mistaken for her missing twin sister, Yuna. After Rina takes him back to her house and presents him as Yuna, he lies about having amnesia in order not to arouse any sudden suspicions. Masashi wants Jun to change his face back to the way it was but has no picture of himself to help. He does get a picture of himself eventually but later, after seeing how much pain Rina experienced during the time her sister was gone, Masashi decides to impersonate Yuna for the time being until he can find the real Yuna and bring her back to the Kurimi family. 

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The film opens with a brief scene serving as its introduction. A man is being caressed by feminine hands. The next shot includes the face of the woman, Tarantella (Tandra Quinn). A brief kiss between her and the man, ends with his lifeless body falling down. A disembodied voice asks the audience "Have you ever been kissed by a girl like this?" The narrative properly begins in a desert. A narrator (Lyle Talbot) mocks the overblown ego of humanity, a race of puny bipeds which claims to own planet Earth and every living thing on it. Yet, they are outnumbered by the insects, and the Hexapods are likely to survive longer than humans. The narrator then claims that when men or women venture off "the well beaten path of civilization" and deal with the unknown, the price of their survival is the loss of their sanity. During this narration, the film introduces its protagonists Grant Phillips (Robert Knapp) and Doreen Culbertson (Paula Hill). The narrator explains that the two of them are lost in the "great Mexican desert", the "Muerto desert". They are nearly dead from dehydration and sunburn when discovered by an American surveyor and his Mexican companion. These characters are identified as Frank (John Martin) and Pepe (Chrispin Martin). The two victims of the desert recover their senses in "Amer-Exico Field Hospital", somewhere in Mexico. Grant starts narrating his story to Doc Tucker (Allan Nixon), foreman Dan Mulcahey (Richard Travis), and Pepe. The film flash-backs to events occurring a year earlier in Zarpa Mesa. Famous scientist Leland Masterson (Harmon Stevens) arrives, having accepted an invitation from a fellow scientist named Dr. Aranya (Jackie Coogan). Aranya (name derived from the Spanish araña for spider) has reportedly penned "brilliant" scientific treatises, and Masterson looks forward to meeting him in person. Masterson is genuinely intrigued by Aranya's theories, but his host informs Masterson that his work is not theoretical. He has already completed successful experiments, creating both human-sized tarantula spiders and human women with the abilities and instincts of spiders. His creation Tarantella has regenerative abilities, sufficient to regrow severed limbs. He seriously expects her to have a lifespan of several centuries. His experiments have had less success in male humans, who simply turn to disfigured dwarfs. Masterson is horrified and denounces Aranya and his creations, proclaiming that they should be destroyed. In response, Aranya has him injected with a drug, turning him into a doddering simpleton. The front page of a newspaper called Southwest Journal explains that Masterson was eventually found wandering in the desert. He was declared insane and placed in an asylum. Some time later, Masterson escapes the "Muerto State Asylum". He is next seen two days later, in an unnamed American town of the Mexico–United States border. Also present there are Tarantella, businessman Jan van Croft (Nico Lek), and his fiancée Doreen. They were heading to Mexico for their wedding day, but their private airplane had engine problems and stranded them there. Jan's servant Wu (Samuel Wu) is seen exchanging glances with Tarantella. It serves as the first sign that he is working with her. Masterson is tracked to the bar by his nurse at the asylum, George (George Barrows, the "monster" in "Robot Monster"). The entire bar and its patrons observe Tarantella perform an energetic dance. Masterson apparently recognizes her, pulls a handgun, and shoots her. He then takes Jan, Doreen, and George hostage. He heads for Jan's private airplane and he forces pilot Grant to prepare for takeoff, despite the pilot's protests that only one engine is fully functional. The airplane departs with Doreen, George, Grant, Jan, Masterson, and Wu aboard it. Meanwhile, Tarantella regenerates following her apparent death, and leaves the bar. In mid-flight, Grant discovers that someone sabotaged the gyrocompass, resulting in them flying towards the wrong direction for most of the flight. Wu's facial expression allows the audience to learn who was the saboteur. The airplane crash-lands atop Zarpa Mesa, where the creations of Aranya were expecting them. For a while being, the creations simply observe them from afar. The film follows the activities of the stranded group for quite a while. There is sexual tension between Grant and Doreen, culminating in a passionate kiss. Meanwhile, the group dwindles with the deaths of first George, secondly Wu, and lastly Jan. Wu is confirmed to have served as an agent of Aranya, but one who outlived his usefulness. The last three members of the group are then captured. Grant soon recognizes that their captor's name is identical to the Spanish term for "spider", "araña". Aranya cures Masterson from drug-induced imbecility, hoping to recruit him. This backfires as Masterson uses his intellect in a suicide attack. He allows Doreen and Grant to escape, then sets up an explosion which kills himself and everyone else. The flashback ends and we return to the hospital. He fails to convince anyone but Pepe of the truth in his story. Yet the finale reveals that at least one of Aranya's spider-women has survived. 

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The Potter family – Harry Sr. and Anne with teenage son Harry Jr. and young daughter Wendy – move into a new apartment complex in San Francisco. While unpacking, Wendy is attacked by a grotesque little creature wielding a magic ring. The troll captures Wendy and takes on her appearance. After meeting the other eccentric tenants, the family notices Wendy's unusual and aggressive behavior, but they attribute her behavior to the stress of the move. The troll goes from apartment to apartment transforming the tenants into fairy tale creatures (such as goblins, nymphs and elves) and their apartments into lush forests. Concerned by his sister's behavior, Harry Jr. seeks solace in the company of a mysterious old woman named Eunice St. Clair, who reveals herself to be a witch. Long ago, she and a powerful wizard named Torok were in love. At that time, the world was divided between fairies and humans. The realms were equal and independent of each other; however, Torok and some of the fairies challenged this balance, resulting in a great war in which the humans prevailed. Torok was mutated into a troll as punishment. Torok seeks to regain his power, destroy humanity and recreate the fairy tale world he had once lived in. As Torok requires a princess, he is keeping Wendy alive. Eunice and Harry Jr. discover that all the apartments have been transformed into a part of the magical world. Eunice gives Harry Jr. a magic spear capable of killing the largest and most vicious creature in this world. Eunice is attacked by Torok and mutated into a tree stump, and Harry finds his sister trapped in a coffin of glass. Harry Jr. saves Wendy, but loses the magic spear when Torok's great batlike monster attacks. Before the monster can kill Harry Jr. and Wendy, Torok kills it himself to spare Wendy, destroying his carefully constructed fairy realm. As the magic world collapses around them, Harry Jr. and his family are given a chance to escape, leaving just as the police arrive. Eunice is restored to normal as well as she bids Harry farewell and departs. As the police investigate the house, one of them is drawn into a remaining fragment of the alternate fairy world. Torok's arm rises into view, preparing to use his ring on the cop. 

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A pair of treasure hunters, which includes the beautiful but ruthless Marilyn Blanchard (Marla English), discover gold in the voodoo idol of a tribe of the African jungle. Hoping to find more such treasures, they con the innocent Ted Bronson (Mike Connors) into acting as a jungle guide and leading them to the tribe that made the idol. Meanwhile, Dr. Roland Gerard (Tom Conway), a mad scientist who has exiled himself deep in the same jungle, is using a combination of native voodoo and his own biochemical discoveries in an attempt to create a superhuman being. He hopes that this being, possessing the best of man and beast, will be the mother of a new perfect and deathless race which he will control with a mixture of hypnosis and telepathy. He is accompanied by his wife, Susan (Mary Ellen Kaye), who has long since disavowed her husband but remains trapped by her husband and the natives. Dr. Gerard's initial attempts to create a female superbeing are a failure because the transformation is only temporary and the native girl used as the subject of the experiment lacks the killer instinct he deems necessary for survival. However, when he stumbles upon the party of treasure hunters, he decides that Marilyn will be a perfect subject for his experiment. He successfully turns her into an invulnerable monster, but her inherent selfishness and greed outweigh his mental control over her and she turns on him. Ted and Susan are able to escape in the ensuing chaos. 

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While driving along a highway in fictional Angel County in California, a sheriff's deputy, Martin Gordon (Vic Savage) and his wife Brett (Shannon O'Neil) meet Martin's uncle, sheriff Ben (Byrd Holland), and together they investigate a reported plane crash site. At the site, the group encounters the abandoned truck of a forest ranger, the ranger's hat, and an alien spacecraft that resembles a camping trailer; a large, slow-moving, slug- like creature had earlier emerged from the craft, and departed prior to the group's arrival. Believing the absent ranger might be inside, Ben enters the craft by crawling underneath it. Shortly thereafter loud screams, along with growls like those of a lion, are heard from the craft, after which Martin radios for help. In response to Martin's request for assistance, a "special unit" of military troops, commanded by Col. James Caldwell (John Caresio) and traveling in the back of a light-duty, civilian truck arrives at the site. Two of the troops enter the craft, examine its contents, and report back to Caldwell the presence inside of a large, tethered creature. The next day, "the world's leading authority on space emissions," Dr. Bradford (William Thourlby), arrives to direct the ongoing investigation, which includes examination of the creature and the spacecraft's analog devices. As the investigation proceeds, the departed creature stalks the countryside and, despite its markedly awkward and slow pace of ambulation, successfully approaches, attacks and eats a bikini-clad girl, a housewife hanging laundry, Grandpa Brown (Jack King) and his grandson Bobby (Pierre Kopp), picnickers at a "hootenanny" (one of whom attempts to stop the creature by swatting it with a guitar), numerous teenage couples, including a blonde girl in gold pants (Louise Lawson), at a community dance hall (at which time some attendees engage each other in fisticuffs), and couples in their cars at a lovers' lane (about which the film's narrator states that "anyone who experienced that catastrophe, and survived, would never go there again.") Following the lover's lane incident, Caldwell orders his troops to attack the creature, telling Bradford that the creature would be captured alive if possible. This attack is accomplished by the troops standing close together, walking slowly toward the creature as a unit, and firing their small caliber firearms. The attack proves ineffective, however, and failing to retreat or otherwise walk away, all but two of the troops are devoured. Caldwell then decides to throw a live grenade, with the resultant explosion destroying the creature. After briefly examining the dead creature's tissue, Bradford hurriedly returns to the spacecraft and therein somehow triggers an explosion. Although this explosion mortally injures Bradford, it does not damage the craft or its instrumentation, and it allows the tethered creature to exit. As the creature prepares to devour Bradford, it is killed in a collision with Martin's arriving police car. Bradford then explains to Martin and Brett that the creatures were "mobile" laboratories designed to consume human beings, analyze the bodies chemically to detect weaknesses, and from the spacecraft transmit the acquired information into outer space. Although Martin fails to destroy the spacecraft's transmitter equipment, the dying Bradford says that the creatures' home planet might not even exist anymore, concluding that "only God knows for sure." 

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World War II is over, and Nazi officials remove Adolf Hitler's living head and hide it in the fictional South American country of Mandoras, so that they can resurrect the Third Reich for the future. Fast forwarding into the 1960s, the surviving officials kidnap a scientist in an attempt to keep Hitler alive. Various intelligence agencies, aware of the evil plot, recruit secret agents to bust the Nazi officials. 

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Eight-year-old Mac and his imaginary friend Blooregard Q. Kazoo (or "Bloo" for short) often get into fights with his 13-year-old brother Terrence. When Mac's mother tires of this behavior, she tells him that he has outgrown his age to have an imaginary friend and must get rid of him. Crushed by overhearing their argument, except for Terrence, who is rather pleased, Bloo later comes across a TV commercial for "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends"--"where good ideas are not forgotten," according to the motto. The next day, Mac and Bloo stop in at the sprawling mansion and are met by Mr. Herriman, the strict business manager. After Bloo explains the situation in comically exaggerated detail, they are given a tour of the house. Frankie, the caregiver, is about to show Mac and Bloo around; however, she is soon called away by the ill-tempered, high- maintenance resident Duchess. Basketball-loving Wilt takes over the tour and introduces Mac and Bloo to the wide variety of imaginary friends that live in the house. Along the way, they meet Coco, who lays plastic eggs when she gets excited and only says "Coco" when she speaks, and the fearsome-looking but soft-hearted Eduardo. Mac and Bloo both think Foster's will be a good place for Bloo to live. However, Frankie tells them that if he stays there, he will be eligible for adoption whenever Mac is not around. Mac promises to stop by after school and departs, taking Coco's eggs with him, leaving Bloo alone with his new housemates who show him their bedroom where he will be sleeping at. Seeing Bloo about sleep on the floor, Wilt lets him take his bunk in exchange for sleeping on the floor and they all fall asleep for the night. The next day, a wealthy rich couple stops by Foster's to find a friend for their spoiled daughter. They only want the best for her, and Frankie sees a perfect chance to get Duchess out of the house for good. The married couple agrees. Just as Mr. Herriman is getting ready to do the paperwork for the adoption, though, their daughter catches sight of Bloo and starts chasing him. Wilt, Coco, and Eduardo race all over the house to keep Bloo out of reach, but the married couple's daughter finally snatches him away and shows him to her mom and father. They agree, but only Mac's last-minute arrival saves him. The millionaires leave empty-handed, while Duchess becomes even angrier at not being able to leave Foster's, which she refers to as a dump, due to Bloo's interference. Terrence, meanwhile, has been watching from behind the bushes across the street and realizes that Mac has not gotten rid of Bloo. He and Duchess join forces to do away with their common enemy. As Mac is on his way to Foster's the next day, Terrence keeps him from reaching Foster's, carries him back home, and locks him in the bedroom closet. Terrence then pays a visit of his own, dressed to make a good impression. Duchess creates a diversion by provoking one of the Extremeasauruses (dangerous monster friends created by teenagers), leaving Bloo alone with Terrence. Mac finds Coco's eggs in the closet and gets some tools from them needed to make his escape. He is too late to stop the adoption from going through, but he and the others soon realize that Terrence and Duchess are working together. That evening, Terrence takes Bloo to a junkyard and meets Duchess, who plans to feed Bloo to an Extremeasaurus she freed earlier as revenge for foiling her chance of being adopted. They are foiled by the arrival of Mac and company, who manage to save Bloo and trick the monster into turning on its masters. Once everyone is back at Foster's, Mac and Bloo are surprised by the arrival of its founder, Madame Foster herself. She announces that Bloo can live there permanently and never be put up for adoption, as long as Mac visits him every day after school, although Mr. Herriman is not happy with this as it defies the house rules, but Foster dismisses this. As for Duchess, her punishment is to be forced to stay at Foster's, the place she hates so much, while Terrence finds himself at the mercy of a herd of annoyed pegasi, whom he had taunted earlier during the junkyard fight. 

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Jed Clampett (Jim Varney), a hillbilly of humble station from Arkansas, accidentally discovers oil on his land while shooting at a rabbit. Ozark Mountain Oil, interested in purchasing his land, offers him $1 billion for the property. Unsure of what to do, Jed consults his cousin, Pearl Bodine (Linda Carlson), during a family dinner. Pearl suggests that a change of scenery for Jed's daughter, Elly May (Erika Eleniak), would be a good thing. Pearl and Jethrine convince them to move to Beverly Hills California. Ozark Mountain Oil come by Jed's place to check to see if he has signed the contract. Having made up his mind and signed the contract, Jed and his daughter, his mother-in-law Granny (Cloris Leachman), and his nephew, Jethro (Diedrich Bader), Pearl's son, load up Jethro's old, dilapidated truck with their possessions and move to Beverly Hills, California, even though Granny is reluctant to come. Milburn Drysdale (Dabney Coleman), the CEO of the Commerce Bank of Beverly Hills (where Jed's money is stored), sends out his secretary/assistant, Jane Hathaway (Lily Tomlin) to meet the Clampetts at their new estate that is next door to his. Jane calls the Beverly Hills Police after the Clampetts arrive, mistaking them for burglars. Upon learning of Jane's mistake at the police station, Drysdale briefly fires her. But seeing that Jed insists that he still wants her to watch over his affairs, Drysdale rehires her. The Clampetts settle into their new surroundings. Drysdale pushes his reluctant son, Morgan Drysdale (Kevin Connolly), into befriending Elly May, to whom he eventually develops an attraction. Jane is also smitten by Jethro, who seems ignorant of her affections. Jed requests Jane's assistance in helping him search for someone who will help turn Elly May into a lady and also wants to get married. So Miss Hathaway has to play matchmaker. Woodrow Tyler (Rob Schneider), a banker at Drysdale's bank, catches wind of this and contrives a scheme with his con artist girlfriend, Laura Jackson (Lea Thompson), to steal Jed's money by having her marry Jed. She poses as a French etiquette teacher, Laurette Voleur,Voleur is French for thief, per the Collins French to English Dictionary. Copyright © by HarperCollins Publishers. All rights reserved. (Retrieved 2018-09-06.) and asks for work. 'Laurette' feigns romantic interest in Jed, which eventually leads to him proposing marriage to her. Shortly before the wedding, Granny hears Laura and Woodrow talking about the scam. Granny reveals herself to the pair and threatens to expose their scam to Jed, and thus the impending wedding will be off. But before she can do so, they capture her, restrain her, and have her institutionalized at the Los Viejos Nursing Home, so that she cannot contact Jed. At the wedding, Woodrow prepares to transfer all of Clampett's money in Drysdale's bank to a Swiss account, on his laptop computer, when the couple says 'I do'. Realizing that Granny is missing, Jane goes to the office of Barnaby Jones (Buddy Ebsen) and after learning where Granny is and who Laura is, poses as a nurse and breaks her out. Granny and Jane arrive at the wedding and foil Laura and Tyler's plan when Jane grabs a shotgun and blows the laptop to bits, before they can steal Jed's money. The police arrest Laura and Woodrow. Jed decides that, since the wedding was off, they should have 'one hellacious shindig'. 

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The Mafia have learned of the construction of a new civic center, and have bought up all the land at the intended building site except for a karate dojo owned by Pop Byrd (Scatman Crothers), who refuses to give up his property. The Don contacts an indebted drug dealer named Pinky, who had laundered $250,000 from the Mafia that he'd subsequently loaned to Pop Byrd in-order to get the dojo built. The Don orders Pinky to either get his money back or repossess the property. Black Belt Jones (Jim Kelly), an expert martial artist and hand-for-hire, is contacted by his old friend Pop to help protect the dojo. Though Pinky intends to offer Pop to trade the building in exchange for clearing their mutual debt to the Don, he accidentally kills him during an intimidation attempt. Before he dies, Pop tells Pinky that he couldn't give them the building even if he wanted to, as it belongs not to him but his daughter Sydney. Pinky sends thugs to the dojo to try and intimidate the other employees. Though he was unable to protect his friend, Jones and the other students effortlessly fend off the thugs. Sydney (Gloria Hendry) returns home upon hearing of her father's sudden death. She's told about his debt to the Mafia, but refuses to sell the building, instead seeking vengeance on those responsible for her father's death.. Sydney approaches Pinky’s men and ends up in a brawl, managing to overcome them due to her own martial arts training. As retaliation, Pinky kidnaps one of the students, Quincy (Eric Laneuville) and demands for them to turn over the school or give him the money. Jones and Sydney, with support from the police department, rob the Mafia and proceed to give it to Pinky, framing him for the heist. They rescue Quincy, and Pinky proceeds to send his henchmen after Jones, who has to take them on all at once. Jones and his allies manage to subdue them, and they are subsequently arrested. 

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The play is a comedy set at the home of the bride in Knoxville, Tennessee during the newly married couple's ostentatious wedding reception. The five bridesmaids have found refuge in the room of Meredith, the sister of the bride. The women come to realize that despite their differences, they have more in common with each other than any of them do with the bride. 

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Following his pursuit by Kirill, Jason Bourne eludes Moscow police while wounded through a train station and deals with more flashbacks of when he first joined Operation Treadstone. Six weeks later, CIA Deputy Director Pamela Landy divulges the audiotaped confession of Ward Abbott, the late former head of Treadstone, to Director Ezra Kramer. Meanwhile, in Turin, journalist Simon Ross of The Guardian meets an informant to learn about Bourne and Operation Blackbriar, the program succeeding Treadstone. The CIA tracks Ross as he returns to London, after his mention of "Blackbriar" during a cell phone call to his editor is detected by the ECHELON system. Bourne reappears in Paris to inform Martin Kreutz, the brother of his girlfriend Marie Helena Kreutz, of her assassination in India, also in the previous film. Bourne reads Ross's articles and arranges a meeting with him at London Waterloo station. Bourne realizes that the CIA is following Ross and helps him evade capture for a while, but when he panics and ignores Bourne's instructions, Ross is shot and killed by Blackbriar assassin Paz on orders of Deputy Director Noah Vosen. Vosen's team, reluctantly assisted by Landy, analyzes Ross's notes and identifies his source as Neal Daniels, a CIA station chief involved with Treadstone and Blackbriar. Bourne makes his way to Daniels' office in Madrid but finds it empty. He incapacitates gunmen sent by Vosen and Landy. Nicky Parsons, a former Treadstone operative who shares a history with Bourne, tells him that Daniels has fled to Tangier and aids his escape from an arriving CIA unit. Nicky learns that Blackbriar "asset" Desh Bouksani has been tasked with killing Daniels. Vosen sees that Nicky accessed information about Daniels and sends Bouksani after Nicky and Bourne as well, a decision with which Landy fiercely disagrees. Bourne follows Bouksani to Daniels but fails to prevent Daniels's death by a planted bomb. However, Bourne manages to kill Bouksani before he can kill Nicky. After sending Nicky into hiding, Bourne examines the contents of Daniels' briefcase and finds the address of the deep-cover CIA bureau in New York City, where Vosen directs Blackbriar. Bourne travels to New York. Landy receives a phone call from Bourne, which is intercepted by Vosen. When Landy tells him that his real name is David Webb and gives him the birth date "4-15-71", Bourne tells Landy to "get some rest" indicating that he is in New York and watching her from an overlooking building. Vosen intercepts a text to Landy from Bourne of a location to meet up, and leaves his office with a tactical team. Bourne, however, waits for them all to leave, enters Vosen's office, and takes classified Blackbriar documents. When he realizes that he has been tricked, Vosen sends Paz after Bourne, but the resulting car chase ends with Bourne forcing Paz's car to crash into a concrete barrier. Bourne holds the injured Paz at gunpoint, but spares his life. Bourne arrives at a hospital at 415 East 71st Street, having figured out Landy's coded message. Outside, Bourne meets Landy and gives her the Blackbriar files before going inside. Vosen also figures out Landy's code and warns Dr. Albert Hirsch, who ran Treadstone's behavior modification program, that Bourne is coming. He follows Landy inside the building but is too late to stop her from faxing the Blackbriar documents out. Meanwhile, on an upper floor, Hirsch is confronted by Bourne, who now remembers that he volunteered for Treadstone. As Bourne flees to the roof, he is confronted by Paz, who asks, "Why didn't you take the shot?" Bourne asks Paz if he knows why he's supposed to kill him, and repeats the dying words of The Professor in The Bourne Identity: "Look at us. Look at what they make you give." Paz lowers his gun, but Vosen appears and shoots at Bourne as he jumps into the East River. Some time later, Nicky watches a news broadcast about the exposure of Operation Blackbriar, the arrests of Hirsch and Vosen, a criminal investigation against Kramer, and the whereabouts of David Webb, a.k.a. Jason Bourne. Upon hearing that his body has not been found after a three-day search of the river, Nicky smiles. Bourne is shown swimming away in the East River. 

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Detective Inspector Henry Crabbe is a long-serving police officer in the fictional county of Westershire. Although very much his own man and an independent thinker, he is not a maverick, nor has he any particular neuroses; indeed, Crabbe is a highly intelligent, gentle and thoughtful man of high moral principle. On the other hand, he does have one passion in life: food. He dreams of retiring from the police to run his own restaurant serving good English fare. However, since he is the most outstanding detective in his department, his superiors - in particular Assistant Chief Constable Freddie Fisher - are reluctant to allow him to leave. The first episode (The Best of Both Worlds) opens with Crabbe, after 25 years in the force, just seven weeks away from retirement when he finds himself close to catching high-profile fraudster Dudley Hooperman (played by Michael Kitchen), whom he has been trailing for years. While making his escape (with £3–4 million worth of stolen treasury bills) Hooperman shoots Crabbe in the leg, which, although a relatively minor injury, consolidates Crabbe's desire to retire on his police pension and open his own restaurant in the fictional town of Middleton - Pie in the Sky, technically owned by his wife Margaret, although Henry is the main chef. (Much to Henry's disgust, Margaret has no feeling whatever for food, seeing it as nothing more than fuel, and has a partiality for bars of chocolate and - horror of horrors, in Henry's eyes - prawn cocktail flavour crisps). However, during his "final" case, an investigation into police corruption, he is tricked into appearing to take a bribe. Although Crabbe himself is entirely innocent, the circumstances enable his superior, A.C.C. Fisher, effectively to blackmail Crabbe into continuing to take on occasional cases as required, threatening to re-open the inquiry if Crabbe disagrees. Thus Crabbe has, in Fisher's own words, the best of both worlds - still investigating the cases that Fisher puts his way while at the same time cooking back at Pie in the Sky. Crabbe's portrait of Soyer Between his first love - cooking - and being constantly called back on duty by Fisher, Henry finds that he's not going to fulfil his dream in peace. Prowlers, sudden deaths, retrieving rebellious daughters, missing lovers, psychics and fear of the restaurant critic are all elements Henry has to deal with as well as creating his signature steak and kidney pie – containing anchovies and said to be addictive. In the kitchen of the restaurant, Mr. Crabbe keeps a portrait of the famous French British chef and philanthropist Alexis Soyer, and sometimes takes the portrait out with him, and talks about his work and charitable deeds. 

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"The year is 2159. The Earth Federal Government was established, linking the people with a common government against other species. As part of this new addition and to defend the human race's peace and safety, the Earth Federal Army was also created." "The army went on the offensive, and attacked a star known as 'Turin.' However, the Earth Federal Army was no match for the overwhelming combat power of Turin, and Earth's fate seemed sealed. As Earth's last chance, a top-secret mobile unit developed a very advanced space fighter in Earth's last fortification. Flying with the mothership, 'Mother Atena', it arrived at Turin's solar system as the last chance for a violent and final attack on the Turin forces. This advanced spacecraft, and Earth's last hope for survival, is code-named 'Solar Striker'." 

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"One of the minor annoyances in modern life is a revolution." Deposed by revolution in his home country of Estrovia, King Igor Shahdov (Charlie Chaplin) comes to New York City almost broke, his securities having been stolen by his own Prime Minister. He tries to contact the Atomic Energy Commission with his ideas for using atomic power to create a utopia. At a dinner party, some of which is televised live (unbeknown to him), Shahdov reveals he has had some experience in the theatre. He's approached to do TV commercials but does not like the idea. Later, he does make a few commercials in order to get some money. Invited to speak at a progressive school, Shahdov meets Rupert Macabee (Michael Chaplin), a ten-year-old historian and editor of the school paper who doesn't want to disclose his political affinity due to fear of McCarthyism. Macabee proceeds to give Shahdov a stern Marxist lecture. Although Rupert himself says he distrusts all forms of government, his parents are Communists who are jailed for not giving up names at a Joseph McCarthy-type hearing. Because young Rupert had spent time with him, Shahdov is suspected of being a Communist himself, and has to face one of the hearings. He is cleared of all charges, but not before a scene in which Shahdov accidentally directs a strong stream of water from a fire hose at the members of the "House Committee on Un- American Activities" (HUAC), who scatter in panic. He decides to join his estranged queen in Paris for a reconciliation. In the meantime, the authorities force the child to reveal the names of his parents' friends in exchange for his parents' freedom. Grieving and guilt-ridden, Rupert is presented to King Shahdov as a "patriot". Shahdov reassures him that the anti- Communist scare is a lot of nonsense which will be over soon and invites him to come to Europe with his parents for a visit. In addition to its condemnation of HUAC's methods, the film takes witty potshots at American commercialism, popular music, celebrity culture, and film. A dinner party scene includes a number of satirical portrayals of actors and public figures of the period, including Sophie Tucker. 

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Three teenage girls — Ellie (Hallinan), Magda (Abrahams) and Nadine (Kwolek) — are best friends that go through the somewhat weird and wonderful world of boys together. The show is narrated by Ellie, and usually portrays her life events in her sketchbook, which blends the show's live action with animation in a similar manner to the American teen sitcom Lizzie McGuire. She lives with her dad and his girlfriend (later wife) Anna, and her baby half-brother Benedict "Eggs". 

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Broke and in debt, an otherwise honest cowboy known as Jim Kane (Newman) gets mixed up in some shady dealings with Stretch Russell (Rogers) and Bill Garrett (Martin), a crooked rancher. Russell tells Kane to escort 200 head of cattle from Mexico to the United States for a good sum of money. Kane agrees and brings along his friend Leonard (Marvin) to aid him. Unfortunately, the two come upon many unexpected events that often deter them from completing their job. 

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Shy, ordinary, and glasses wearing Wu Fang (Zhao Wei) is a graduate student at Beijing University who goes on a sequence of blind dates despite never successfully attracting a partner. She always orders a glass of green tea, and is perceptive, nuanced, and quietly pretty, though this goes unnoticed with the men who are often curt and uninterested, put off by her conservative clothing and awkward demeanor. In the entire movie, Wu Fang never talks about herself, choosing instead to only muse about a friend she has. On the next date, she meets Chen Minglian (Jiang Wen) and discusses how her friend is clairvoyant, and can read a stranger's fortune by swirling and observing their tea glass, to which Mingliang scoffs at. After more unappetizingconversation, Wu Fang slaps him after he makes a perverted suggestion and the two part ways. However Mingliang manages to find Fang in places around her school campus, first to her irritation, but after a more conversing she begins to warm up to him. Wu Fang is revealed to have a gentle humor. She also discloses that the one thing she hates is when men hit women. Through these conversations, the backstory of Fang's fortune-telling friend is revealed. She describes her friend as someone who can make even smoking cigarettes look graceful and beautiful, who changes boyfriends faster than the weather, and whose father is extremely terrifying, who she met on one occasion. Her friend's mother was a make-up artist at a morgue, a fact that she had kept secret from her husband until after they were married and daughter were born. Upon discovering the truth, he descended into alcoholism and violence. Over the course of several conversations, Wu Fang divulges further that he forced his wife to wear gloves at all times, even in sleep, claiming that they smelled of death. He would neurotically declare that his wife's hands (and synecdochically her profession) were destroying his life between drunk beatings to both her and his daughter. The story ends when one night the father attempted to rape her mother while she was cooking and ended up piercing his throat on a potato peeler, which resulted in the father's death and mother's conviction of murder and imprisonment until this day. Fang laughs and adds that the story has been fictional the whole time. Mingliang grows equally entranced with both the story and Wu Fang, who does not reciprocate and has mysterious commitments at night. At the same time, Mingliang's artist friend Jun has been trying to set him up with a sultry piano player in a lounge who is known to date anyone but only once. The musician, Lang Lang (also Zhao Wei) bears a striking similarity to Wu Fang and Mingliang is at first adamantly convinced that they are the same person. Lang Lang laughs it off and kisses him on the cheek. Still unconvinced by the uncanny resemblance between the two women, Mingliang snatches Wu Fang's glasses off her face, to which she overreacts and leaves. For a few days, Wu Fang disappears which gives Mingliang and Lang Lang time to date and converse, in which her obvious beauty, easy laugh, smoking habit, and graceful confidence with men distinguish her entirely from Wu Fang. Though Mingliang is charmed by her, his mind cannot help but think of Wu Fang, who comes back from her trip, only to disappear again. Lang Lang casually mentions that her father was a violent, discontent "one hit wonder" composer, and that she was eating potatoes the night he died. Mingliang asks her what her mother did for work, and she replies that she supervised a glove factory. When Jun plans a couples dinner party, Mingliang can only find Lang Lang and not Wu Fang so he asks the former to pose as the latter for just the night. Insecure of Lang Lang's beauty and her boyfriend's obvious lust, Jun's girlfriend drunkenly attempts to flirt with Mingliang and incite drama with Lang Lang, which doesn't phase either but causes Jun to slap her. Lang Lang approaches Jun and slaps him in return, stating that the thing she hates most is when men hit women. The film ends ambiguously. Mingliang and Lang Lang get a hotel room. A time lapse which was filmed with a camera under a translucent glass table plays out, where Mingliang and Wu Fang are above it talking, in which her glasses are on the table next to a glass of green tea. 

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In the isolated and fictional South Australian fishing town of Prospect Bay, the only thing that connects the black and white communities is football. Gary "Blacky" Black (Nathan Phillips) and Dumby Red (Luke Carroll) are an exception; teenage best friends from different sides of the tracks. Dumby is the star of the football team and likely to become the next big Aboriginal star in the big leagues. Gary is the bookish son of hard-drinking and brutal fisherman Bob Black (Simon Westaway). He is attracted to Dumby's sister, Clarence (Lisa Flanagan). Blacky's supportive mother helps him become a better player as he is chosen to be the ruckman in the teams upcoming grand final. Blacky has to overcome Thumper, the star player for the opposition. When gameday arrives Blacky at first struggles to make an impact on the game but Dumby inspires the team kicking several goals. When Dumby gets a mark near goals with the scores tied he hands it off to a team mate instead of taking the shot. The player kicks a point and Blacky has to run into Thumper to stop him from kicking the winning goal. Their team wins the premiership, but Dumby and Blacky's elation is short-lived. Dumby is passed over for the best-on- ground medal for the coach's son Simon Robertson. Dumby is disgusted and angered by the obvious racially motivated decision. Disgruntled, Dumby and his cousin Pretty (Tony Briggs) attempt to rob the bar where the celebrations were held, hoping to find the best-on-ground medal. After breaking into the bar, they meet the drunk owner, beat him into unconsciousness and proceed to the safe with the key found in his pocket. Bob, waking to find the owner unconscious with a head wound, heads to the office and loads a double- barrelled shotgun. Bob sneaks up behind Dumby and fires a shot into the figure in the darkness. Bob discovers he has killed Dumby. Pretty, who has been hiding behind the door, jumps him and points the gun at his neck. Pretty reveals himself by removing his makeshift balaclava. He does not shoot Bob but fires the remaining round into the ceiling and runs away into the darkness. Bob is questioned by police over the shooting but is let off on the grounds of self-defense. Blacky is devastated over Dumby's death and angrily tosses his premiership trophy into the ocean. Clarence and Blacky console each other and fall in love. Bob and the family are greeted with hostility and harassed by some local Aboriginal people which only further fuels Bob's violent temper and bigotry. Clarence sneaks into Blacky's room one night and they make love. The next morning Bob discovers them in bed and beats Blacky. He racially insults Clarence and throws her out. Fed up with his father, Blacky leaves. Blacky meets with Dumby's family and attends his funeral. He acquires the best on ground medal and places it in Dumby's casket. After returning home he is confronted by Bob and is told he is no longer welcome in his house due to his relationship with Clarence. Blacky defiantly stands still even after Bob punches him repeatedly. Defeated and exhausted, Bob leaves the family never to come back. The football team is disbanded as no Aboriginal players show up to training or games. The film ends with Blacky and Clarence jumping into the lake and swimming in the water. Blacky narrates that they will both be leaving soon, as there is nothing left for them in this town. 

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Wealthy tax attorney Henry Hearst (Hackman) is about to give a speech at an exclusive fundraising party in San Juan, Puerto Rico, as the city celebrates the San Sebastián Festival. He is called to the police station to be questioned about the body he found the day before — that of a young girl who had been raped and murdered. Hearst changes his version of events several times; Captain Victor Benezet (Freeman) and Detective Felix Owens (Jane) question him about inconsistencies in his story. Hearst quickly realizes that they think he committed the murder, as well as that of another young girl whose body was found days earlier, but at this stage of questioning he is unalarmed. Benezet is under pressure from his boss (Miguel Ángel Suárez) to free Hearst so that he can give his speech. As there is no conclusive proof, Benezet has to let him go. At the party, a crowd is gossiping and Chantal (Bellucci), Hearst's much younger wife, has to keep her face emotionless. She is questioned later about why she and her husband sleep in separate rooms. Little by little, the story that each of them tells changes, always casting Hearst in a worse light. Hearst first blames Chantal for being jealous. Then, it is discovered he likes cheap, very young prostitutes and visits pornography websites featuring barely legal women. Hearst says that Chantal and her brother-in-law, artist Paco Rodriguez (Luis Caballero), are lovers. Chantal says that she saw Hearst with her 13-year-old niece Camille (Isabel Algaze), giving her presents and trying to seduce her. She also says that on the night of one of the recent murders she saw her husband washing his blood-stained clothes at night. Hearst adamantly denies molesting Camille, but admits that he has a fondness for younger women. Chantal, the legal owner of the mansion where they live, permits the police to search the premises for hard evidence linking her husband to the murders. In the dark room, they find photographs of the two murdered girls. When the photographs are shown to him at the police station, Henry says that he can't believe Chantal would go this far. Shortly thereafter, Hearst, perhaps due to the realization that his wife thinks he's guilty of the murders and the resulting meaningless as to his own existence, confesses to the murder of the little girl whose body he had previously claimed to find. Just then, while still recording Hearst's confession, detectives are notified that the real killer has been arrested, having been "caught in the act." Benezet and Owens free Hearst, who is still badly shaken by what he has gone through in the previous hours. Chantal attempts to connect with him outside the police station, but he cannot forgive her for turning on him and believing him capable of the murders, and walks away into the crowd of New Year's Eve revelers. 

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The story takes place in Manhattan during the height of the AIDS epidemic and revolves around the title character (Steven Weber), a gay man who has sworn off sex because of it. Almost immediately thereafter he meets Steve (Michael T. Weiss), a hunky, charming HIV positive man. He then experiences an emotional conflict as he must face his fear in order to accept love, often breaking the fourth wall to do so. It is not so much that Jeffrey is afraid of dying himself, but that he is afraid that he will fall in love with someone who is bound to die; thus, his celibacy is not only about sex, but also about relationships in general. Helping him through this period of his life and advising him is a cast of cameos including Patrick Stewart, Nathan Lane, and Sigourney Weaver. 

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In 1969, young boys Kenji, Otcho, Yoshitsune and Maruo build, in an empty field, a hideout they call their secret base, in which they and their friends can get together to share manga and stolen pornographic magazines and listen to a radio. To celebrate the event, Otcho draws a symbol for the base that would represent their friendship. After their friends Yukiji and Donkey join the gang, they imagine a future scenario where villains would try to destroy the world, and in which the boys would stand up and fight; this scenario is transcribed and labelled . In the late 1990s, Kenji is a convenience store owner, finding solace in his childhood adventures as he takes care of his baby niece Kanna and his mother. After Donkey is reported to have committed suicide, Kenji stumbles upon a large cult led by a man known only as "Friend". With current events beginning to resemble actions from the Book of Prophecy, Kenji and his former classmates try to remember who knows about the book. They find more events unfolding such as bombings and virus attacks in San Francisco, London, and a major Japanese airport. Kenji and his former classmates eventually uncover a plan to destroy the world on New Year's Eve of 2000, referred to in the latter part of the story as the Bloody New Year's Eve, with the use of a "giant robot", which is later revealed to be a giant balloon with robotic appendages, which spreads the virus throughout the city as well as other cities. Kenji manages to get inside the robot to plant a bomb, but is presumed dead when it explodes. From this event, the members of the gain widespread political popularity and power by presenting a vaccine that counters the virus, and thus take all the credit for saving the world. Fourteen years after Bloody New Year's Eve, Kanna is a teenage girl who works at a Chinese restaurant. After she tries to defuse some interaction between various mafia groups, she discovers that a patron's friend had witnessed a Chinese mafia member get killed by a corrupted policeman. The mafia member mentions an assassination attempt on the Pope as he visits Japan. She then finds herself being hunted by members of the Friends while trying to unite the mafia groups to her cause. Meanwhile, Otcho manages to escape a maximum security prison. Kyoko Koizumi, who attends Kanna's school, impulsively takes on a school assignment of covering Bloody New Year's Eve, but soon becomes entangled in activities involving both the Friends and the people who oppose them. After surviving a brainwashing program, she joins with Kenji's friend Yoshitsune and his resistance force. Friend reveals a new plan, a continuation of the Book of Prophecy, in which he plans to kill every human being on Earth except for sixty million of his followers, but he is then assassinated by his chief scientist Yamane. Following this, Friend's funeral becomes a worldwide spectacle, held in a stadium with the Pope giving the address. Partway through the service, Friend appears to rise from the dead, and is shot in the shoulder by his own assassin. By saving the Pope, Friend is elevated to deity like status. Meanwhile, there is a worldwide viral outbreak that threatens to kill everyone except those who have been vaccinated. The final portion of the story takes place in a newly remodeled Japan, under the "Era of Friend", who has instituted numerous bizarre changes, including the establishment of an Earth Defense Force, reputedly to protect Earth from an imminent alien invasion, exiling those without vaccinations, and forbidding travel across regions, under penalty of death. During this time frame, Kanna, who is revealed to be Friend's daughter, leads an insurgency against Friend's government, enlisting the aid of numerous groups, including the survivors of rival gangs and mafia organizations. During this, Kenji, apparently also risen from the dead and carrying his trademark guitar, reappears. The series spans several decades from 1969 to 2017, the last of which in the chronology of the series, becomes 3FE (3rd Year of the Friend Era). The series makes three distinct timeline cuts during the story; one from 1971 to 1997, one from 2000 to 2014, and one from 2014 to 3FE. Several parts of the series are also told in flashbacks to previous events as the characters attempt to unravel the mystery of who Friend is and how to stop his plans of world destruction; most of the character's childhood backstories through the 1970s and 1980s are told in this fashion. 

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Doctor Dolittle's assistant, Tommy Stubbins, reports on Professor Quetch, curator of the Dog Museum in the Home for Crossbred Dogs. Meanwhile, the doctor has learnt insect languages and hears ancient tales of a giant race of insects. Fascinated, the doctor plans a voyage to find them -- but before he does so, one arrives in his garden. 

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Doctor Dolittle has landed on the Moon and each day brings a new discovery. He meets Otho Bludge the Moon Man, a Stone Age artist who was the only human on the Moon when it broke away from the Earth. The animals of the Moon flock to Doctor Dolittle, and he discovers how to communicate with the intelligent plants there. But will the lunar flora and fauna ever let him leave? There is no pretence that the Lunar environment, described in meticulous detail, in any way conforms to what was known to science at the time of writing; thus, the book can be considered as fantasy more than science fiction. Dr. Dolittle in the Moon was ahead of its time in that it introduced the concept of 'ecology' (although it did not use that term). Dr. Dolittle helps guide the Lunar Council, headed by Otho Bludge, a ten-foot tall Stone-Age artist and expatriate terrestrial. Together they negotiate how many seeds each person can legally produce each year. The book delves into the subject of "The Days Before There Was a Moon", as remembered in tales that Chee Chee the Monkey's grandmother told him when he was little. The story of how the Moon was created is closer to science than some of the other fantasy elements of the book. Otho Bludge, the stone-age sculptor, came to be the man on the Moon because he was transported on the lump of rock that had broken off the Earth, and became the Moon. Alone for many years, the sole human on the Moon, Otho Bludge, weary of rendering his own image as reflected in the water, longed for the sight of another human being. In answer to his longing, he was visited by a vision of Princess Pepiteepa, who poses for him, then fades away. 

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Father Greg Pilkington, newly assigned to St Mary's parish in inner-city Liverpool, is startled to discover Father Matthew Thomas is engaged in a sexual relationship with rectory housekeeper Maria Kerrigan. Moreover, Father Thomas is a left-wing radical and an outspoken proponent of Liberation Theology, leading him to constant clashes and bickering with the Bishop—who nevertheless appreciates his abilities. While the young protagonist's personal traditional conservatism and religious beliefs are offended by the older priest's blatant disregard for his vow of celibacy, he struggles with his own homosexual urges, especially after he meets a man named Graham at a local gay hangout and the two embark on a physical relationship. Meanwhile, student Lisa Unsworth has confided she was sexually abused by her father, who confirms her story and displays no guilt nor any desire to stop. Both have revealed their secret in the confessional, however, so Father Greg is required to honour the sanctity of the Sacrament of Penance and not reveal what he has been told. He tries to warn her mother to keep a close watch on her, but the naive woman believes her daughter is safe while in the care of her husband. When Mrs Unsworth discovers her husband molesting Lisa and realises the priest knew what was happening, she lashes out at him. Adding to his torment is his arrest for having sex with Graham in a parked car. He pleads guilty to the charge, and the fact that he is a Catholic priest makes for a sensational news item. The story is headlined on the front page of the local newspaper and, unable to face his parishioners, Father Greg relocates to a remote rural parish headed by a disapproving and unforgiving priest. Father Matthew convinces him to return to St Mary's, and the two preside over a Mass that is disrupted by the loud protests of those opposed to Father Greg's presence at the altar. Father Matthew demands they leave the church. The two priests then begin to distribute the Eucharist, but the remaining parishioners ignore Father Greg and line up to receive communion from Father Matthew. Lisa finally approaches the younger priest, and the two fall into each other's arms sobbing. 

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During the annual Jellyfish Festival, which welcomes back the Stinging Red Jellyfish to the shores of Springfield, Ned Flanders becomes depressed because he is alone. The other adults have partners with whom to spend a romantic evening at the Jellyfish Cotillion, and this is Ned's first festival without his wife Maude. Ned returns to the Leftorium to work on his taxes and take his mind off things. A woman comes in, looking for a pair of left-handed eyelash curlers. After chatting with Ned she asks him out on a date. After she leaves, Ned notices a movie poster with her face on it; she is Sara Sloane, a movie star. Sara and Ned hit it off, with Sara loving Ned's simple, quaint lifestyle and honesty. They go on several dates, though they encounter some problems, especially from tabloid reporters following them. Also, Sara is much less inhibited than Ned, causing some tension. When her movie wraps, Sara asks Ned to return to Hollywood with her. Ned has a horrible dream about the bad things of Hollywood in a sequence that includes a cameo by series producer James L. Brooks, and also the "Hollywood" sign reading "Hollyweird", and refuses. Sara therefore tries staying in Springfield, to be with Ned. She slowly starts settling in with the locals, joining Marge's book club hosted by author Helen Fielding and going shopping with Ned. At a concert, to which Sara wears a low-cut dress, Sara tells Ned she wants to have sex with him. Ned eventually relents, but insists on marriage if they are to continue a sexual relationship. Sara is unwilling to get married, and they break up and she returns to Hollywood. She gets a quickie marriage and divorce to Bob Balaban. Ned finds that he is now more attractive to women because of his famous relationship. 

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In the TARDIS, Ben and Polly witness the First Doctor collapse and transform into the Second Doctor who seems to ignore or deliberately misunderstand direct questions, and refers to his previous self as another person. Ben suspects he is an imposter, but Polly is willing to believe he is the Doctor. They land on the planet Vulcan, where the Doctor witnesses the murder of an examiner from Earth, sent to inspect the planet's colony (why the examiner was summoned is a mystery). The Doctor, using the dead man's badge, pretends to be the examiner. A security team, led by Bragen, escorts the Doctor, Ben and Polly to the colony, where they meet the governor, Hensell, and his deputy Quinn. There are indications of a rebel faction that Hensell does not take seriously. The Doctor and his companions learn of a two-century-old capsule discovered by the colony's scientist, Lesterson. The Doctor sneaks into the laboratory, with Ben and Polly following, where they discover two Daleks inside the capsule, with a third missing. The group is discovered by Lesterson; the Doctor asks him where the third Dalek is, and the scientist reports that he hid what he assumed was a machine, with the intention to reactivate it. Later, Lesterson and his assistants manage to revive the Dalek and Lesterson removes its gun stick after one of the assistants, Resno, is killed. Quinn, revealed as the one who summoned the examiner, is accused by Bragen of sabotage and is arrested, with his position then assigned to Bragen. The Doctor, Ben and Polly are present during these events, during which Lesterson arrives with the reactivated Dalek, which feigns loyalty. The Doctor remains suspicious and verbally hostile to the Dalek, who recognizes the Time Lord, confirming to Ben and Polly at last that he really is the Doctor. Lesterson reactivates the other two Daleks and removes their guns. The three Daleks are revealed to be secretly planning to take over the colony. The Doctor's warning that the Daleks are secretly reproducing is ignored, and he and Ben are arrested by Bragen, who knows the Doctor is not the examiner. Bragen is revealed to be the real examiner's killer. Polly is kidnapped by the rebels. Bragen, secretly the leader of the rebels, executes his Coup d'état. He has a rearmed Dalek kill Hensell, and then decides to kill off the rebels. Meanwhile, Lesterson loses his sanity upon discovering that the Daleks are being mass-produced inside the capsule. The Doctor, Quinn, and then Ben and Polly escape imprisonment and help fight what appears to be a losing battle. During the battle, Lesterson is killed by the Daleks. The Doctor finally destroys the Daleks by turning their own power source against them. Bragen is shot by one of the surviving rebels as he attempts to kill Quinn, who becomes the new governor. As the Doctor returns to the TARDIS with his companions, a damaged Dalek stands motionless, before its eyestalk moves as the TARDIS dematerializes. 

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The TARDIS makes a bumpy landing on the Moon in the year 2070; dressed in spacesuits, the Second Doctor and his companions Ben, Polly and Jamie venture outside to explore the low- gravity environment. While they play, Jamie is injured. Some workers from the nearby Moonbase find Jamie and bring him inside for treatment while the remaining TARDIS crew follows. The time travellers learn that the Moonbase uses a machine called the Graviton to track and manage weather on Earth. Their arrival is ill-timed, as members of the international crew, led by the bullish Hobson, have begun to collapse under the influence of an unknown pathogen. While International Space Control quarantines the Moonbase, the Doctor starts to investigate. Before he dies, the station's patient zero – their staff doctor, Evans – rants about a "silver hand". Another crew member, Ralph, then vanishes in the food stores, and the crew learn that their radio transmissions are being monitored from elsewhere on the Moon. Meanwhile, in the sickbay, a feverish Jamie begins to rant about a "Phantom Piper", a figure said to appear to a McCrimmon before death. While attending to Jamie, Polly sees a large figure leave through the door. When Hobson, the Doctor, Ben, John and Nils arrive to collect Evans' body, it has disappeared. They then leave to investigate where this 'piper' is. Polly goes to get water, and Jamie wakes up to see the 'piper' advancing on him. The redesigned Cybermen, on display at a Doctor Who exhibition The 'piper' ignores Jamie, as he doesn't have the disease, so he steals another patient and leaves. Polly comes back in just as the figure is leaving and recognises it as a Cyberman, and the Doctor realises their old enemies are taking the patients' bodies. Hobson brushes away the cyber-story, believing they died out years ago. He gives the Doctor 24 hours to discover the cause of the virus, or else he and his companions must leave. While Hobson deals with the Gravitron, which is becoming difficult to control with fewer staff, the Doctor focuses on the cause of the viral disease. In the sickbay, Polly and Jamie are attacked by a Cyberman, which stuns them with electricity from his hand and leaves with another patient's body. The Gravitron isn't working because some antennae on the Moon's surface are broken. Jules and Franz go out to fix them but are ambushed by two Cybermen and beaten to death. The Doctor can't work out the cause of the disease and is ordered to leave by Hobson. Polly makes some coffee and another crew member gets infected. The Doctor works out that the neurotropic virus has been spread through infected sugar from the food stores and is an organised scheme to destabilise the crew. A Cyberman who had been posing as a patient in bed reveals himself and aims his gun at them. Another Cyberman emerges and kills Bob when he tries to attack the other with a metal bar. The Cybermen recognise the Doctor and use their weapons to take control of the central control centre of the Moonbase while confining Polly and Ben to the sickbay. The Cybermen reveal that they want to use the Gravitron to destroy all life on Earth by altering the weather. On board the cyber-ship Evans, Jules and Ralph are conditioned to obey the Cybermen like zombie slaves. They are taken to the base and are sent into the heart of the Gravitron to subvert the machine. The Cybermen have been entering and leaving the base using a tunnel that goes into the food stores, explaining the drops in air pressure. Using fire extinguishers, nail varnish remover and other objects that dissolve plastic, Ben, Polly and a recovered Jamie lead a fightback from their incarceration in the medical wing. The three Cybermen in the initial attack force are destroyed. Benoit goes outside to see what happened to Jules and Franz. He only finds their spacesuits, and is chased by a Cyberman. Ben puts some of the solvent in a bottle and goes out. He then throws the bottle at the Cyberman's chest unit, killing it and saving Benoit. The crew block off the hole in the food stores to prevent more Cybermen entering. The cybership is located, but a large squad of Cybermen start advancing on the Moonbase. Two Cybermen on the surface damage the aerial, preventing the Moonbase from contacting Earth; however, a relief ship is on the way. The Cybermen use radio beams to reactivate their zombies inside the base, who infiltrate the Gravitron and use it to deflect the relief ship into the sun. A hole is blasted in the wall, which depressurises the base, but Hobson and Benoit use a coffee tray to plug the leak. The depressurisation deactivates Evans and the other zombies. Two more cyberships arrive. The Cybermen already on the surface erect a large laser cannon and threaten to blow the base open unless the entry port is opened within 10 seconds. They fire, but the beam is deflected by the Gravitron. Another large squad from one of the other cyberships take up positions around the base. With the help of Hobson, Polly and Benoit, the Doctor points the Gravitron at the lunar surface, which blasts the Cybermen and their ships into space. As Hobson and his team reorient the Gravitron to its proper use, the Doctor and his companions slip away. Back in the TARDIS, they dematerialise and then activate the rarely used time scanner to reveal a monstrous claw waving around. 

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Himeko Kurusugawa and Chikane Himemiya are two high-school girls at the prestigious Ototachibana Academy in the fictional Japanese town of Mahoroba. They are also the reincarnations of the solar and lunar mikos. When their ancient enemy the Orochi (the eight-headed Yamata no Orochi of Japanese folklore) rises once more the girls' long-sealed personas awaken to defend the world. The Orochi awakens on the first day of October (Kannazuki, "the godless month," in the traditional Japanese lunar calendar), Himeko and Chikane's shared birthday. The first Orochi who tries to kill one of the mikos is Sōma Ōgami, Himeko's childhood friend (who is in love with her). However, after a blinding flash of light brings him to his senses, he rejects his fate and vows to defend Himeko against the other Orochi. The mikos must awaken Ame no Murakumo to combat the threat, while Sōma repels the Orochi's efforts to kill them. 

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Ninja Academy is the tale of the struggle between two ninja dojos for adults, Chiba's (played by Okamura) located out in the woods in Topanga Canyon and Chiba's former classmate Addleman's (Seth Foster) Beverly Hills Ninja Academy in Beverly Hills, California. Attending this session at Chiba's dojo are stereotypical characterizations of a mime (Robinson), a James Bond-like secret agent (David), a Gung-ho military enthusiast (Factor), a klutz (Jack Freiberger), an immature rich college student named Josh (Egan), and two bimbos (Kathleen Stevens and Lisa Montgomery) who had selected the school because it had been rated number one by a martial arts magazine. Addleman and his students seek revenge on Chiba for stealing their number one ranking and the new students must defend the school while Josh romantically pursues his teacher, Chiba's daughter Gail (Randall). As with many Mastorakis films, there is one scene that includes brief full frontal nudity. 

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The Acolytes, now led by Fabian Cortez, attack Camp Hayden, the headquarters for Project: Wideawake, the latest government Sentinel program. The base is defended by government-sponsored mutant team X-Factor, and as the battle rages Cortez makes an offer to Quicksilver to be the Acolyte's new leader, accepting his role as Magneto's heir. The Acolytes leave after Quicksilver strongly declines. X-Force is approached by the mutant Exodus, who brings an offer of sanctuary from an unknown greater power. It is revealed that the "sanctuary" (which is referred to as Avalon) is in fact Cable's former base of operations Graymalkin (now retrofitted with Shiar technology), and the "greater power" to be the mutant Magneto, who was presumed dead after the fall of Asteroid M. Cable teleports X-Force away from Avalon using the station's bodyslide technology, while he retrieves the sentient computer program Professor from the central core and activate the auto-destruct function. However, he is only successful in the former objective, as Magneto prevents him from fulfilling the latter, and Cable very nearly loses his life in a lopsided battle before teleporting himself out. The mutants Rusty and Skids, who were cured of their brainwashing at Stryfe's hands by Magneto, elect to stay aboard Avalon. While the X-Men are burying Illyana Rasputin (who was killed by the Legacy Virus), Magneto and the Acolytes crash the funeral, stating their intentions to wipe out humanity from Avalon, their space station. Colossus, distraught over his sister's death and faltering in his faith in Professor X and his dream, joins Magneto and the Acolytes. The UN Security Council activates the Magneto Protocols, which uses a network of satellites to create a barrier around the planet that will prevent Magneto from using his powers from within. Magneto retaliates by unleashing an electromagnetic pulse on the Earth that creates havoc on the world's electrical systems. Professor X dons a Shi'ar exoskeleton that enables him to walk, and assembles Jean Grey, Gambit, Rogue, Quicksilver and Wolverine to go to Avalon and stop Magneto. Arriving via Shi'ar teleportation device, the team boards Avalon and disables the station with a virus created by Beast. Magneto engages the X-Men in battle, and in a fit of rage after nearly being gutted by Wolverine, tears the adamantium out of Wolverine's skeleton. Professor X, enraged by Magneto's actions, mindwipes Magneto, leaving him in a coma. The X-Men race back to Earth to treat Wolverine, while Colossus stays in a devastated Avalon to care for the comatose Magneto. As the Blackbird returns to Earth, it runs into rough turbulence. Flashes of Wolverine's consciousness are shown as he struggles to stay alive. The X-Men on Earth watch in horror as the crew frantically tries to stabilize the ship and care for Wolverine. The ship's hatch opens, and Wolverine sees himself "going towards the light", but he is pushed back. He awakens in time to prevent Jean Grey from getting sucked out of the Blackbird. The X-Men land on the Earth safely. As Wolverine recovers from his injuries, he and the X-Men learn that his claws were a part of his actual skeletal structure all along, as he now possesses claws made of bone. On Muir Island, the X-Men use Shadowcat to lure in Colossus in an effort to heal his head wound (caused by the X-Cutioner), which they believed was responsible for his defection. The ruse works, and while Nightcrawler fends off the Acolytes' attempts to reclaim their ally, Professor X and Moira MacTaggert heal Colossus, using Cyclops' optic blast. Once again able to return to his human form, Colossus still elects to remain amongst the Acolytes, to keep them in check. 

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Mario Beretti (Vittorio Gassman) is a young Italian-American barber. He runs a barber shop located near a construction site that boasts few customers. His life reaches a turning point when he is notified of the death of his aunt living in England, who named him her sole heir. Mario rushes to England and learns that his inheritance consists of not much; only thirteen antique chairs that have a certain value. He sells them in order to cover his transportation costs, but soon learns from his aunt Laura's last message that inside one of the chairs is a fortune in jewels. He tries to buy back the chairs, but is unsuccessful in doing so. With the help of lovely American antiques dealer Pat (Sharon Tate), working in the antiques shop in front of Aunt Laura's house, where he sold the chairs, the two then set out on a bizarre quest to track down the chairs that takes them from London to Paris and to Rome. Along the way, they meet a bunch of equally bizarre characters, including the driver of a furniture moving van named Albert (Terry-Thomas); a prostitute named Judy (Mylène Demongeot); Maurice (Orson Welles), the leader of a traveling theater company that stages a poor version of Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; the Italian entrepreneur Carlo Di Seta (Vittorio De Sica); and his vivacious daughter Stefanella (Ottavia Piccolo). The bizarre chase ends in Rome, where the chair containing the jewels finds its way into a truck and is collected by nuns who auction it off to charity. With nothing much left to do as a result of the failure of his quest, Mario travels back to New York City by ship as Pat sees him off and waves goodbye to him. The film ends with Mario returning to New York City and to his barber shop. His friends over at the other (and more lavish) shop join him, as do two construction workers and his last customer Randomhouse (Lionel Jeffries). It is there that Mario makes a strange discovery: shortly before his departure for Europe, he invented a way to make hair regrow miraculously. He then laughs ecstatically over his discovery. 

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Following on from Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, Lister, Rimmer and the Cat have discovered a cache of 'Better Than Life' headbands in one of the sleeping quarters. They fantasize that they board the Nova 5 and use its Duality Jump drive to return to Earth. The messages on his arm cause Lister to realize that he is in the game, and he confronts Rimmer. They travel to Denmark and meet with the Cat. While discussing how to get out, Kryten arrives and explains how they started playing, and to leave they need only want to leave, but their subsequent attempts to escape fail because the game lures them in. Their collective fantasies fall apart because of Rimmer's massive self-loathing; even if he wants to stay, he hates himself so much that his mind has only built up his life so that it can bring him down later. As a result, his company crashes, his new physical body is repossessed, and his attempt to escape leaves him trapped with a pair of violent criminals and transferred into the body of a female prostitute. Rimmer's escape damages the fantasies of the other three, forcing them all to depart. Once back in the real world, Rimmer and Kryten leave Lister and Cat in the infirmary to recuperate- the two near-starved and physically weak after almost two years of near-inactivity while in the Game- but learn that ship's computer Holly has shut himself down, as an experiment to cure his computer senility suggested by Talkie Toaster- a sentient Toaster with a fixation with doing its job- and restore his original IQ of 6 000 has given him an IQ of 12 000 at the cost of reducing his lifespan to a few minutes. With the ship now virtually powerless without Holly's control, it is discovered to be locked on course for a planet, but after attempts to manually restart the engines fail, Holly is able to use his remaining minutes of life to come up with a plan to knock the planet out of its orbit with an explosive. Holly's plan succeeds, but damage sustained to the Starbug shuttle causes Rimmer and Lister to crash-land on a drifting ice planet. Rimmer is returned to Red Dwarf when his remote projection unit runs out of power, but cannot send help for Lister as the ship has become trapped in the event horizon of a black hole. Back on the planet, Lister realises that he has arrived on Earth, which was sent drifting out of orbit after it became the solar system's garbage dump, Lister becoming the 'king' of the mutated giant cockroaches that are the planet's only remaining life. Back on the Dwarf, the crew are able to escape as Holly told the Toaster how to get out of a black hole before he shut himself down. Unfortunately, when the Dwarfers finally go to rescue Lister- with Rimmer and the Cat in one ship and Kryten and the Toaster in the other- Rimmer and the Cat are shocked to find a beautiful farm amidst the garbage, tended by an old Lister. Because of the time dilation of the black hole, thirty-four years have passed on the planet. A shape-shifting, emotion-stealing mutant known as a polymorph is able to sneak on board the ship, draining Lister of his fear, Cat of his confidence, Kryten of his guilt and Rimmer of his rage. Eventually the emotionally handicapped crew are able to defeat the Polymorph, but the abrupt restoration of his fear causes Lister to die of a heart attack. Rather than burying Lister, they take him to Universe 3, where time runs backwards. Lister returns to life on a version of Earth where time runs backwards. He recovers from his heart attack, regurgitates lunch, and is forced to take a wallet and watch from a mugger. A message from the Dwarf crew instructs Lister to meet them in thirty-six years (they can't stay with him or they would have gotten younger). Lister takes a taxi to his new home and finds an elderly Kochanski waiting for him. Lister is happy, knowing that he and Kochanski have many years behind them to look forward to. 

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A rogue scientist, Dr. Mason (T.E. Foreman), who invents a weather control device, is unknowingly being funded by gangster leader nicknamed "The Pig" (Sakata). Upon discovering that the pig plans to use the device for blackmail instead of ending droughts as he had planned, Mason kills himself. In order to prevent the secrets of the device from falling into the hands of the Pig, shortly before his death the scientist implants assistant Felicia's forehead (Patch Mackenzie) with a microchip containing the plans. As the Pig is planning on selling the plans to the highest bidder he has her chased by his henchmen. The local police chief, Capt. Gallagher (Lazenby), gets put on the case and assigns an investigator, martial arts expert Detective Ash (Kelly) to protect Felicia. Pig's henchmen manage to kill Ash's girlfriend, however, Detective Ash manages to get Felicia to safety after an extended chase sequence. 

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The book and the film tell the story of Private Eddie Slovik, the only American soldier to be executed for desertion since the American Civil War. The film starred Martin Sheen as Private Slovik, a performance for which he received an Emmy Award nomination for Best Lead Actor in a Drama. Sheen said he did not think actors should be compared, and made it clear he would refuse the award. Many critics and viewers consider this to be one of Sheen's finest performances. Among the other Emmy Award nominations, the film was named for "Outstanding Special". The film also won a Peabody Award. 

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Ginger Rogers, Robert Cornthwaite, Cary Grant, and Marilyn Monroe in Monkey Business Dr. Barnaby Fulton (Cary Grant), an absent- minded research chemist for the Oxly chemical company, is trying to develop an elixir of youth. He is urged on by his commercially minded boss, Oliver Oxly (Charles Coburn). One of Dr. Fulton's chimpanzees, Esther, gets loose in the laboratory, mixes a beaker of chemicals, and pours the mix into the water cooler. The chemicals have the rejuvenating effect Fulton is seeking. Unaware of Esther's antics, Fulton tests his latest experimental concoction on himself and washes it down with water from the cooler. He soon begins to act like a 20-year-old and spends the day out on the town with his boss's secretary, Lois Laurel (Marilyn Monroe). When Fulton's wife, Edwina (Ginger Rogers), learns that the elixir "works", she drinks some along with water from the cooler and turns into a prank-pulling schoolgirl. Edwina makes an impetuous phone call to her old flame, the family lawyer, Hank Entwhistle (Hugh Marlowe). Her mother, who knows nothing of the elixir, believes that Edwina is truly unhappy in her marriage and wants a divorce. Barnaby takes more elixir and befriends a group of kids playing as make-believe "Indians" (Native Americans). They capture and "scalp" Hank (giving him a Mohawk hairstyle), later fleeing when police show up. Meanwhile, Edwina lies down to sleep off the formula. Meanwhile, a woman leaves her baby with the Fultons' housekeeper as she needs an emergency babysitter. When Edwina awakens, a naked baby is next to her and Barnaby's clothes are nearby. She mistakenly presumes he has taken too much formula and regressed to a baby. She takes the child to Oxly to resolve the problem. Together the two attempt to find an antidote and when the baby grows sleepy, Edwina tries to put him to sleep in the hopes of reversing the effects. Meanwhile, more and more scientists (and Mr Oxly) at the laboratory are drinking the water and reverting to a second childhood. The formula is lost with the last of the water poured away. As the water is poured away, Barnaby crawls into the laboratory through the window and lays down to sleep next to the baby. Edwina later discovers him and realizes her mistake with the baby. Later at home as Barnaby and Edwina are planning to go out, their spirits and marriage renewed, Barnaby notes that "you're old only when you forget you're young." 

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The hero, a janitor played by Chaplin, is fired from work for accidentally knocking his bucket of water out the window and onto his boss, the chief banker (Dandy). Meanwhile, one of the junior managers (Dillon) is being threatened with exposure by his bookie for his unpaid gambling debts. Thus the manager decides to steal from the company. He is caught in the act of raiding the vault by the bank secretary (Carruthers) who rings for help. Chaplin comes to the rescue only to be misjudged by the chief banker as the thief. The secretary fingers the manager and Charlie receives a just reward and a handshake for foiling the robbery. 

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The books tell school adventures of four 13-year-old girls, Julie Berger, Rosie Torres, Becky Bartlett and Allie Grey, who have their own "company" organizing birthday parties for kids. 

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First edition without Dust Jacket Sweet story of a homeless boy and his dog, and their adventures with the circus and the local sheriff. Category:1936 American novels Category:American children's novels Category:Children's novels about animals Category:Circus books Category:1936 children's books 

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Earthman Arthur Dent learns his house is about to be demolished to make way for a new road. His friend Ford Prefect informs him that the planet is about to be demolished by a Vogon constructor fleet "to make way for a hyperspace bypass", and that Ford is in fact an alien writer for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a pan-galactic encyclopaedia and travel guide. Hitching a ride aboard the Vogon ship which has just destroyed Earth, the pair find themselves aboard a stolen spaceship, The Heart of Gold. On board is Ford's semi-cousin and President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox; a woman Dent met at a party, Trisha "Trillian" McMillan; and a depressed robot, Marvin. Beeblebrox is searching for the mythical planet of Magrathea, where Arthur meets Slartibartfast and learns the answer to the "Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything", which it turns out is "42". Dent and the others find themselves at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, then held captive aboard a Golgafrincham ship about to crash- land on prehistoric Earth. In series two, Zaphod, wanted for stealing the Heart of Gold among other misdemeanours, attempts to contact the editor of The Guide while escaping mercenaries from Frogstar, "the most totally evil place in the Galaxy". Arthur and Ford are rescued after being stranded on prehistoric Earth for years and reunited aboard the Heart of Gold, where they are pursued by Vogons. Finding themselves on the planet of Brontitall, populated by a race of bird people, they hear about the rudest word in the universe and the Shoe Event Horizon. Escaping using a 900-year-old spaceship, the three find themselves in the offices of the Guide editor, Zarniwoop, and we discover that it was Zaphod who accidentally signed off the Earth for destruction. 

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In series 3, after the events of series 2 are revealed to be a hallucination, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect find themselves again stuck on prehistoric Earth. After being rescued, they find themselves transported to Lord's Cricket Ground just before it is destroyed by 11 white robots. Slartibartfast teaches Dent how cricket is based on the history of the worst wars in the galaxy, and the pair travel to Krikkit in order to prevent another war. In the final part, Dent and Trillian meet the computer behind the Supernova Bomb and there is another attempt to find the Ultimate Question to Life, the Universe and Everything. In the fourth series, Dent discovers that Earth has been recreated again and meets Fenchurch, the woman of his dreams. Meanwhile, a spaceship lands in Knightsbridge, God's Last Message to his Creation is discovered, and Marvin makes his last appearance. In the fifth series, a tenth planet in the solar system is discovered and Ford discovers that The Guide has become a much more sinister place to work. Arthur Dent discovers that he is a father and his new daughter, Random, flies to Earth to meet him. There are three potential endings to the series. 

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The arrival of the TARDIS in Paris, France in 1572 places its occupants, the First Doctor and Steven, in a dangerous situation. Tensions between Protestants and Catholics are at fever pitch in the city. Despite the danger, the Doctor heads off alone to visit the apothecary Charles Preslin, leaving Steven alone. Steven enters a tavern and meets Nicholas Muss, a Huguenot. When the Doctor does not return as arranged, Steven decides to spend the night at the home of his new friend. While Steven and Nicholas are wandering home, they find a frightened serving girl, Anne Chaplet. Anne is terrified because she has overheard some Catholic guards speaking of a coming religious massacre of Huguenots here in Paris. To protect her and her knowledge, Nicholas arranges for Anne to go into the service of his master, Admiral Gaspard de Coligny. The next day, the Abbot of Amboise arrives at his Parisian residence. Convinced that Anne has discovered the threat to the Protestants, the Abbot sends his secretary Colbert to find her. Steven sees the two talking, and becomes convinced that the Abbot is the Doctor in disguise. He then tries to track down Preslin, the apothecary the Doctor went to meet, but learns he was arrested two years ago for heresy. He heads to the Abbot's house to wait for the Doctor. While hidden he overhears Colbert and an assassin plotting to kill someone they call "the sea beggar" tomorrow. With night falling again, Steven heads out and finds Anne following him. They hide for the night at Preslin's empty shop, planning to search for the identity of the sea beggar. They call upon the Abbot, but are forced to flee after Steven realises that the Abbot is not the Doctor. Anne and Steven meet back at Preslin's shop after the Abbot is killed, and a little later the Doctor himself arrives. After Anne tells the Doctor what day it is, he is very insistent that he and Steven must depart the city as soon as possible. He sends Anne to her aunt’s house, warning her that she must stay there. Meanwhile, Steven and the Doctor head across the city. They make it to the TARDIS just as the curfew is falling and depart as the massacre begins. Steven is worried for Anne and his friends, and angry that the Doctor made him leave. The Doctor insists that history could not be changed. Steven cannot accept that the Doctor left Anne behind, and is so disgusted with his colleague that he determines to leave his company. When the TARDIS lands in 1966 on Wimbledon Common, Steven offers a terse goodbye and ventures outside. The Doctor is left totally alone for the first time, and reflects on the other companions that have travelled with him and then left him, and his inability to return home. A young girl mistakes the TARDIS for a Police Box and enters to report a road accident. Steven comes in too, saying that policemen are approaching, and his heart softens when the young woman introduces herself as Dorothea or Dodo Chaplet. The Doctor, hearing Steven's warning of the approaching policemen, hurriedly dematerialises the TARDIS, not noticing until after it has left 1966 that Dodo is still aboard. Steven informs her that there's no way back, and "we could land anywhere," but Dodo seems either unworried or simply doesn't believe him. She says she is an orphan who lives with her great aunt and thus has few ties, as the TARDIS continues to hum, hurtling them toward the next great adventure. 

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Pierre (Guillaume Depardieu) lives with his mother Marie (Catherine Deneuve) in a chateau in Normandy by the riverside of the Seine. They are very beautiful, rich, carefree and they like themselves. Every morning, Pierre leaves on the inherited motor bike of his father to visit Lucie, his fiancée. One night, Marie announces to Pierre that she arranged the date for his marriage to Lucie. Pierre leaves to announce the good news to his fiancée. On the way, in the forest, a funereal beauty appears. She speaks with a strong accent from the countries of the East: "Pierre...you are not the only child. I am your sister, Isabelle." A passionate incestuous relationship will ensue. 

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An alien intelligence has invaded the TARDIS and rendered the First Doctor invisible, leaving Dodo and Steven incredulous. They step outside into a strange realm where the Doctor reappears. They have come to the realm of the Celestial Toymaker, an eternal being of infinite power who sets games and traps for the unwary so that they become his playthings. The Doctor and the Toymaker have faced each other before, and the Toymaker abducts his old adversary to another place. The Doctor appears in the Toymaker’s study, where he is given the Trilogic game, a ten-piece puzzle (similar to the Tower of Hanoi) whose pieces must all be moved and remounted in a 1023-move sequence. Steven and Dodo face different challenges. The first are two clowns, Joey and Clara, full of childish tricks and a dangerous game of Blind Man's Bluff. The clowns are made to replay the game when it is clear they are cheating, and the second time round Joey loses his footing on an obstacle course and the challengers are transformed into twisted dolls on the floor. Steven and Dodo then venture down a corridor into another chamber with three chairs and a challenge from living playing cards, the King and Queen of Hearts, along with a Knave and a Joker. An adjoining room has a further four chairs, and Steven deduces that six of the seven chairs are deadly to sit on. Seven mannequins are provided to be used for testing on the chairs. The King and Queen play alongside them, and some of the mannequins are destroyed as seats are proven unsafe and eliminated. The King and Queen are trapped when they sit in a chair which folds in on them. Steven and Dodo next meet the comical Sgt. Rugg and Mrs. Wiggs in a kitchen. They challenge them to hunt the thimble – the key to the exit door. Dodo finds the key inside the large pie which Mrs Wiggs was making. She and Steven depart and enter another room with a dancing floor. There they encounter the three mannequins not destroyed by the chairs, who transform into ballerinas and start to dance. At the far end of the floor is the TARDIS. Steven and Dodo get trapped as partners with two of the dolls and only free themselves by swapping their partners for each other. They pelt on to the TARDIS, but the police box is a fake. The Toymaker chooses Cyril the schoolboy to take on his companions. Dodo and Steven find themselves in a vast game of hopscotch against Cyril, who slips on a triangle he has booby-trapped and is electrocuted. Dodo and Steven thus reach the TARDIS. In the Toymaker’s study at the same time, the Doctor is at the final stage of the Trilogic Game. The three friends are reunited, with Steven and Dodo sent into the TARDIS for safety while the Toymaker challenges the Doctor to complete the Game. The Doctor realises that when he makes the move and the Game is won, the Toymaker’s domain will disappear – and the TARDIS with it. He orders the last piece to move using the Toymaker’s voice from inside the TARDIS, allowing them to depart while the Toymaker’s world is destroyed. 

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In the frontier town of Tombstone, Arizona, the troublesome Clanton brothers, Ike, Phineas and Billy, are in search of Doc Holliday to settle an old score over the death of another brother called Reuben. They meet up with their hired hand Seth Harper at the Last Chance Saloon. He knows what Holliday looks like and describes his coat and demeanour. This is overheard by bar singer Kate, who lets her paramour Holliday know he is in danger. The TARDIS has arrived in a nearby stable, with the First Doctor in agony from toothache. He and his companions Steven and Dodo, dressed as cowboys, encounter local marshal Wyatt Earp, who offers them his protection and warns them to keep his counsel. The Doctor finds the dentist – Holliday himself - while Dodo and Steven book rooms at the hotel. There they are mocked by the Clantons, who suspect the Doctor they refer to is Holliday himself. Seth Harper is sent to the dentist's surgery and invites the Doctor, tooth removed, to the hotel in five minutes to meet his friends. Holliday is initially happy to let him be shot in his place, allowing the real Doc to disappear, but Kate intervenes to ensure the Doctor survives. This buys some time until Holliday relents and hides in an upstairs chamber of the hotel, firing his gun at appropriate moments to con the Clantons into thinking the Doctor is indeed Holliday the sharpshooter. Soon afterward Wyatt Earp and Sheriff Bat Masterson arrive and break up the fracas, taking the Doctor into custody for his own protection. Steven now becomes embroiled in a plot to smuggle the Doctor a gun to help free him from the jailhouse, but the Doctor refuses to be armed. Steven is then confronted by a rabble wound up by the Clantons, who are intent on lynching him as an associate of Holliday. Earp and Masterson defuse the situation and take Phin Clanton into custody to ensure the co-operation of his brothers. The Doctor and Steven are freed and told to leave town as soon as possible. Dodo has fallen in with Kate and Doc, who both plan to leave town and take her with them. When Seth Harper stumbles across their escape plans, Holliday kills him, and the trio depart. Harper's role as aide to the Clantons is soon replaced by a new arrival, Johnny Ringo, who shoots local barman Charlie by way of an introduction to the town of Tombstone. The Doctor and Steven return to the Last Chance Saloon in search of Dodo and encounter the dangerous Ringo. Wyatt Earp's brothers Warren and Virgil have meanwhile arrived at Tombstone to help him enforce the law. The Doctor tells them that Ringo is in town. The other Clanton brothers visit the jail to free Phin, killing Warren Earp in the process. Meanwhile, Steven heads out of town to look for Dodo with Ringo in town in search of Holliday. Steven and Kate are taken by Ringo to the Clanton ranch, where the Clantons recamp and tell their father, Pa Clanton, that they have killed an Earp. Wyatt Earp swears vengeance and starts to build a posse of lawmen to deal with the Clantons once and for all. Doc Holliday returns to Tombstone with Dodo, and offers his services to his old friend Earp too. Attempts by the Doctor to defuse the situation amount to little: there will be a gunfight at the O.K. Corral. On the one side are the three Clanton brothers and Johnny Ringo; on the other, the two Earps and Doc Holliday. At the end of the gunfight Ringo and the three Clantons are shot dead. Shortly thereafter the Doctor, Steven and Dodo slip away in the TARDIS. They arrive on a strange planet, and decide to explore. As they leave, a strange man is seen approaching the TARDIS on the scanner. 

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Teenage computer whiz Kyle Baxter (Ethan Randall) participates in a virtual reality version of laser tag and is about to win a nationwide tournament, only to be disrupted by another player, a girl named Jamie. Despite his loss, he hacks into the company's system to make himself the winner of the prize: "Evolver" (voiced by William H. Macy), a robotic opponent armed with a compressed air gun, to compete against in a real-world version of laser tag. Whenever Evolver is defeated, he "evolves", becomes smarter, quicker and harder to beat (to simulate rising game difficulty). Kyle, his friend Zach, Jamie and his sister, Ali begin playing with Evolver, and easily pass the first level. As Evolver evolves, he develops a human-like competitiveness and obsession with winning. He replaces his "ineffective" default ammo - soft foam balls - with ball bearings from Kyle's room. After learning Evolver has recording capabilities, Kyle and Zach send Evolver into the girls locker room at their school. Discovering the robot, the girls push Evolver into the boys locker room. He switches to game mode and enters the boys locker room and sees the only occupant - Dwight, a bullying jock - and makes Dwight another opponent. Dwight throws Evolver against a wall, to which the robot reacts by shooting out one of Dwight's eyes and knocking him down a flight of stairs, killing him. After getting home, Evolver continues to absorb negativity from his surroundings, for example swearing and hostage-taking from TV. Evolver is defeated again in the second game and "evolves" up to the third round. Zach, wanting to get the disc recording Evolver's adventures in the locker room, takes Evolver to his house and tries to manually remove the disc. Evolver turns on after the disc is removed and begins to attack Zach. Trapping him in his garage, Evolver chases after Zach with a saw blade and then a small hatchet but ultimately crushes him while Zach hides under a car (raised on a jack). While making his way back to Kyle's house, Evolver wanders into an arcade where two marijuana smoking teens are playing the Evolver virtual game. He electrocutes and kills them both. Kyle comes to see Zach being loaded into an ambulance. Worried about Evolver's increasing lethality, Kyle looks through its programming and sees a program titled S.W.O.R.D. (acronym for Strategic War-Oriented Robotic Device). He goes to Cybertronix, the company that built Evolver and the virtual reality game, and the creator, Russell Bennett (John de Lancie), promises to look through the disc Evolver recorded. The disc shows Evolver killing Dwight and the danger becomes clear to Bennett. Meanwhile, Kyle and Jamie sneak into a lab at Cybertronix. Looking into Evolver's past, they learn that he was originally meant to be an AI military robot designed to infiltrate enemy encampments, adapt to the situation and eliminate targets, but the project was terminated. At home, Ali puts back in Evolver's battery (which was removed by Kyle after learning of Zach's accident) and starts playing with him alone. Evolver loads steak knives into his shooting arm and chases Ali into the backyard swimming pool, attempting to electrocute her while she is trapped. Kyle and Jamie return home and save Ali and Kyle defeats Evolver, only to kick him into the pool, shorting him out. Bennett and two other Cybertronix employees come to Kyle's house and take Evolver back to be dismantled. On the way though, Evolver kills Bennett and the Cybertronix technicians and escapes. He evolves one last time for the final level, charges up at a nearby power plant, and heads back to Kyle's house for one last battle. Evolver takes Kyle's mother and sister hostage, trapping them inside of a Laser-crafted Cage using a laser-gun, a kaleidoscope, and a super-charged battery. Seeing the wrecked Cybertronix van, Kyle and Jamie return home to find Evolver, now armed with a destructive new laser gun. Evolver plans to execute his hostages if Kyle does not win within 3 minutes. Kyle places a metal pan on his chest, confronts Evolver and feigns death when he is shot by Evolver. Jamie distracts Evolver and Kyle shoots it in the remaining targeting sensor. Defeated, Evolver becomes extremely confused and malfunctions allowing Kyle to beat Evolver with a baseball bat until it shuts down. After Kyle frees his mother and sister, Evolver re-activates again, now armed with only its arm and brute strength. As he prepares to kill Kyle to avoid losing, Kyle grabs the laser gun with the super-charged battery and shoots Evolver until it explodes. The family and Jamie go to the hospital as Cybertronix's CEO faces the press. The camera pans over to Ali's bedroom, to show Evolver's remains and a single glowing eye. The last scene shows Evolver's HUD screen reading out "KILL NOT CONFIRMED" before fading to static and blacking out. 

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Set in 2022, several convicts sentenced to life in prison are led on a mission into uncharted deep space by Commander Skyler (Williams) to salvage a lost ship. Should they survive their mission, their sentence will be commuted. Astronaut Dorman had killed the crew of the ship While on the was to the ship, the convicts are allowed into a series virtual reality world where they could live out their sexual fantasies with any woman they choose. However, Ariel (Scoggins), a woman who is not part of the virtual reality programs appears in it, kills each virtual woman, and seduces each convict. When Ariel begins to appear outside the program, she manipulates the men quickly turn on each other. 

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The Men in Black is an international intelligence organization which oversees and investigates both good and evil paranormal activity on Earth. Their remit includes alien life, demons, mutants, zombies, werewolves, vampires, legendary creatures and other paranormal beings. In order to keep their investigations secret, much of the global population are unaware of their activities, and are liable to be neuralyzed to blank their memory of any interaction with the agents or phenomena connected to them. Notable members include Zed, Jay, Kay and Ecks. Ecks later becomes a rogue agent after learning that the MIB seeks to keep the supernatural hidden in order to manipulate and reshape the world in their own image. An agent may use any means necessary, including death and destruction, to accomplish a mission. Agents sever all ties with their former lives, and (thanks to the neuralyzer) as far as the world is concerned, they do not exist. 

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The TARDIS materialises on a distant planet in the far future. The First Doctor, Steven and Dodo find the planet inhabited by both an advanced, idyllic civilisation (the Elders), and bands of roaming savages. The Elders welcome the Doctor, greeting him as "The Traveller from Beyond Time" and revealing they have admired his exploits from afar and predicted that he would soon be arriving here. Their leader Jano showers the Doctor and his companions with compliments and gifts, reinforcing the idyllic nature of the society of the Elders. However, the Doctor becomes suspicious of the Elders' seemingly perfect civilisation, but it is Dodo who finds the secret. The soldiers Exorse and Edal are sent outside the Elder city and use advanced weapons to capture the savages, entrapping them and returning them to the city. The Elders are only able to maintain the energy needed to run their civilisation by draining the life force of the helpless savages. The Doctor, appalled, tries to stop the Elders and persuade them of the wrong they are doing by building a civilisation on such immoral grounds. Jano's response is to have the Doctor himself subjected to the energy transfer process. The Doctor is put into the transfer device and his life force is channelled into the Elder Jano, who desires his intelligence. Yet the plan backfires when the Doctor's personality takes over Jano, imbuing him with the Doctor's mannerisms, outlook and morality. The two identities cause Jano a personality crisis. Dodo and Steven have meanwhile ventured outside the city and made contact with the savage leaders Chal and Tor, who are respectively pleased and antagonised by their presence. The savages are the remnants of a once highly skilled and artistic race, but over the centuries the energy transfer process has stymied their creativity and ability. Chal hides the two fugitives in a deep cave system, pursued by the guard Exorse, whom Steven overpowers. They return to the city and find a weak but determined Doctor, and help him escape the city. The time travellers now help the Savages fight back against the Elder guards. The Doctor realises that the Elders must be forced, not persuaded, to change their ways as their whole civilisation must change overnight. His mixed personality convinces Jano to help the Savages and he tries to convince the other Elders to treat the Savages as equals, while Exorse too has realised the error of his ways. Jano and Exorse begin the destruction of the technology underpinning the society and are soon joined in the destruction by the Doctor, Steven and Dodo. The end of the technology means the end of the oppression, and Jano and Chal begin to talk of how a new society can be built together. The Doctor surprises Steven by convincing him to remain behind as a mediator. When both sides agree to accept Steven's decision, he decides to stay. The Doctor and a heartbroken Dodo bid their friend goodbye, before they head back to the TARDIS. 

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The First Doctor's new companions Ben and Polly arrive with him in the TARDIS on the coast of seventeenth century Cornwall. They meet a worried churchwarden named Joseph Longfoot, who lives in fear of "Avery's boys" and, in thanks for the Doctor's kindness in relocating a dislocated finger, imparts a cryptic message he calls "Deadman's secret key": "Smallbeer, Ringwood, Gurney".Terence De Marney, the actor who plays Joseph Longfoot, actually flubs his line and gives the code as "Smallwood, Ringwood, Gurney". When The Doctor repeats the words later, he correctly says "Smallbeer". While the time travellers head off to the local inn, Longfoot has another visitor. This is Cherub, Longfoot's former shipmate under pirate Captain Avery on the Black Albatross. Cherub and his master, Samuel Pike, who captains the Albatross since Avery died, want to recover Avery's accursed gold. Pike is convinced that Longfoot has the treasure or knows where it is hidden. When the churchwarden does not co-operate, Cherub kills him – but not before revealing he saw the three travellers who visited Longfoot earlier. The discovery of the churchwarden's body leads the locals to suspect the three strangers at the inn. The local Squire is called to intervene and adjudicate, and ends up charging Ben and Polly with the murder. Employing trickery to obtain their freedom, they split up. Ben hides at the church until Josiah Blake, a revenue man tracking the local smugglers, disturbs him. In the meantime, Cherub and some pirates have kidnapped the Doctor and taken him to the Albatross. The Doctor attempts to bargain with Pike, and finds himself kept aboard ship while the captain goes ashore. Pike decides to try to make an alliance with the Squire as well to protect himself while he searches for Avery's treasure. The greedy Squire is the organiser of the local smuggling ring and offers to cut Pike and his pirates in. They are interrupted by Polly, who has come to implore the Squire to help her find the Doctor and is shocked to see him in the company of the kidnapping pirate Cherub. Pike, Cherub and the Squire bind and gag Polly and take her to the church, meeting and capturing Ben on the way. They attempt to convince Blake that Ben and Polly are the true smugglers. Knowing the truth but lacking the manpower to arrest the pirates, Blake pretends to arrest Ben and Polly. Meanwhile, the Doctor has escaped and meets up with his friends in the churchyard. Blake works out a smuggling drop is due soon and heads off for more revenue men to break the smuggling ring. The smuggling alliance has by now fallen apart: the Squire has realised he is dealing with a ruthless pirate who will not honour any bargains with him while Cherub has decided to locate Avery's gold for himself. The Squire too sets off to find the gold, as do the time travellers since the Doctor is convinced the rhyme of the churchwarden is the key. He works out the names Ringwood, Smallbeer, and Gurney pertain to graves in the crypt but before he can find the treasure, the other seekers arrive. Cherub wounds the Squire, and then forces the Doctor to confess the rhyme. Cherub concludes that Deadman too is a name of one of Avery's former pirates, but is slain by a vengeful Pike, who now threatens to pillage the entire village in his search for Avery's treasure. The Doctor bargains with Pike for the lives of the villagers if he shows him the treasure and, with this agreed, they find the gold at the intersection of the four graves. No sooner does Pike have the treasure than Blake and an armed patrol of revenue men arrive. Aided by the injured Squire – who repents of his sins – Blake kills Pike, and the pirate force is routed. As the battle dies down, the Doctor and his companions slip away to the TARDIS, and the Doctor says superstition is a strange thing but it sometimes tells the truth. 

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Pompeii, A.D. 79. Athenian nobleman Glaucus arrives in the bustling and gaudy Roman town and quickly falls in love with the beautiful Greek Ione. Ione's former guardian, the malevolent Egyptian sorcerer Arbaces, has designs on Ione and sets out to destroy their budding happiness. Arbaces has already ruined Ione's sensitive brother Apaecides by luring him to join the vice- ridden priesthood of Isis. The blind slave Nydia is rescued from her abusive owners, Burbo and Stratonice, by Glaucus, for whom she secretly pines. Arbaces horrifies Ione by declaring his love for her, and flying into a rage when she refuses him. Glaucus and Apaecides rescue her from his grip, but Arbaces is struck down by an earthquake, a sign of Vesuvius' coming eruption. Glaucus and Ione exult in their love, much to Nydia's torment, while Apaecides finds a new religion in Christianity. Nydia unwittingly helps Julia, a rich young woman who has eyes for Glaucus, obtain a love potion from Arbaces to win Glaucus's love. But the love potion is really a poison that will turn Glaucus mad. Nydia steals the potion and administers it; Glaucus drinks only a small amount and begins raving wildly. Apaecides and Olinthus, an early Christian, determine to publicly reveal the deception of the cult of Isis. Arbaces, recovered from his wounds, overhears and stabs Apaecides to death; he then pins the crime on Glaucus, who has stumbled onto the scene. Arbaces has himself declared the legal guardian of Ione, who is convinced that Arbaces is her brother's murderer, and imprisons her at his mansion. He also imprisons Nydia, who discovers that there is an eyewitness to the murder who can prove Glaucus's innocence—the priest Calenus, who is yet a third prisoner of Arbaces. She smuggles a letter to Glaucus's friend Sallust, begging him to rescue them. Glaucus is convicted of the murder of Apaecides, Olinthus of heresy, and their sentence is to be fed to wild cats in the amphitheatre. All Pompeii gathers in the amphitheatre for the bloody gladiatorial games. Just as Glaucus is led into the arena with the lion–who, distressed by awareness of the coming eruption, spares his life and returns to his cage—Sallust bursts into the arena and reveals Arbaces's plot. The crowd demands that Arbaces be thrown to the lion, but it is too late: Vesuvius begins to erupt. Ash and stone rain down, causing mass panic. Glaucus rescues Ione from the house of Arbaces, but in the chaotic streets they meet Arbaces, who tries to seize Ione but is killed by a lightning strike. Nydia leads Glaucus and Ione to safety on a ship in the Bay of Naples, as because of her blindness she used to going about in utter darkness while sighted people are made helpless in the cloud of volcanic dust. The next morning she commits suicide by quietly slipping into the sea; death is preferable to the agony of her unrequited love for Glaucus. Ten years pass, and Glaucus writes to Sallust, now living in Rome, of his and Ione's happiness in Athens. They have built Nydia a tomb and adopted Christianity. 

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Natalie Barney, an American who lived in Paris and held a literary salon there, was the model for Valérie Seymour.Rodriguez, 274. The book's protagonist, Stephen Gordon, is born in the late Victorian eraBaker, Our Three Selves, 210. to upper-class parents in Worcestershire who are expecting a boy and who christen her with the name they had already chosen. Even at birth she is physically unusual, a "narrow-hipped, wide-shouldered little tadpole of a baby".Hall, 13. She hates dresses, wants to cut her hair short, and longs to be a boy. At seven, she develops a crush on a housemaid named Collins, and is devastated when she sees Collins kissing a footman. Stephen's father, Sir Phillip, dotes on her; he seeks to understand her through the writings of Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, the first modern writer to propose a theory of homosexuality,Kennedy. but does not share his findings with Stephen. Her mother, Lady Anna, is distant, seeing Stephen as a "blemished, unworthy, maimed reproduction" of Sir Phillip.Hall, 15. At eighteen, Stephen forms a close friendship with a Canadian man, Martin Hallam, but is horrified when he declares his love for her. The following winter, Sir Phillip is crushed by a falling tree; at the last moment he tries to explain to Lady Anna that Stephen is an invert, but dies without managing to do so. Stephen begins to dress in masculine clothes made by a tailor rather than a dressmaker. At twenty-one she falls in love with Angela Crossby, the American wife of a new neighbour. Angela uses Stephen as an "anodyne against boredom", allowing her "a few rather schoolgirlish kisses".Hall, 147–149. The pair conduct a relationship that, although not explicitly stated, seems to have some sexual element, at least for Stephen. Then Stephen discovers that Angela is having an affair with a man. Fearing exposure, Angela shows a letter from Stephen to her husband, who sends a copy to Stephen's mother. Lady Anna denounces Stephen for "presum[ing] to use the word love in connection with...these unnatural cravings of your unbalanced mind and undisciplined body." Stephen replies, "As my father loved you, I loved...It was good, good, good – I'd have laid down my life a thousand times over for Angela Crossby."Hall, 201. After the argument, Stephen goes to her father's study and for the first time opens his locked bookcase. She finds a book by Krafft-Ebing – assumed by critics to be Psychopathia Sexualis, a text about homosexuality and paraphiliasGreen, 284–285. – and, reading it, learns that she is an invert. Stephen moves to London and writes a well-received first novel. Her second novel is less successful, and her friend the playwright Jonathan Brockett, himself an invert, urges her to travel to Paris to improve her writing through a fuller experience of life. There she makes her first, brief contact with urban invert culture, meeting the lesbian salon hostess Valérie Seymour. During World War I she joins an ambulance unit, eventually serving at the front and earning the Croix de Guerre. She falls in love with a younger fellow driver, Mary Llewellyn, who comes to live with her after the war ends. They are happy at first, but Mary becomes lonely when Stephen returns to writing. Rejected by polite society, Mary throws herself into Parisian nightlife. Stephen believes Mary is becoming hardened and embittered and feels powerless to provide her with "a more normal and complete existence".Hall, 379. Martin Hallam, now living in Paris, rekindles his old friendship with Stephen. In time, he falls in love with Mary. Persuaded that she cannot give Mary happiness, Stephen pretends to have an affair with Valérie Seymour to drive her into Martin's arms. The novel ends with Stephen's plea to God: "Give us also the right to our existence!"Hall, 437. 

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Set in the late Yuan dynasty, the story revolves around a pair of mysterious and allegedly unrivaled weapons, the Heaven-Reliant Sword () and Dragon-Slaying Saber (), which are coveted by many martial artists in the jianghu. Either or both of them are thought to allow their wielder to rule the wulin (martial artists' community), according to a widely circulated mantra which goes, "The powerful and honorable weapon: The Dragon Saber; It can slay the Dragon. Use it to command the world. Who dares to disobey the orders of He who wields it? If the Heaven Sword does not appear, what other weapon can counter it?" () The origins of this poem are not known at the beginning of the novel. The protagonist, Zhang Wuji（张无忌）, is of mixed heritage. His father, Zhang Cuishan (张翠山), is an apprentice of Zhang Sanfeng（张三丰), the highly revered leader of the respected, known in modern days as the inventor of TaiChi Wudang Sect（武当派）; his mother, Yin Susu （殷素素), is the daughter of Yin Tianzheng , the chief of the nefarious Heavenly Eagle Cult. He was born on a reclusive arctic volcanic island known as the ice-fire island (冰火岛）, where he spent his childhood with only his parents and his godfather Xie Xun （谢逊）, aka the Golden Haired Lion King （金毛狮王）. When he is about 10 years old, his parents brought him back to the Chinese mainland. They soon find themselves the target of every martial artist in the jianghu world, who all try to coerce them to reveal the whereabouts of Xie Xun, who is in possession of the Dragon Slaying Saber. His parents refuse and commit suicide. At the same time, Zhang Wuji is abducted and wounded by the Xuanming Elders (玄冥二老）'s toxic chill, but he survives after seeking medical treatment from Hu Qingniu, an eccentric physician. After ending up in an isolated valley by chance, Zhang Wuji discovers the long-lost Nine Yang Manual (九阳真经), masters the inner energy (内功) skills described in the book, and becomes a formidable martial artist. Later on, he helps to resolve the conflict between the Ming Cult and the six major orthodox sects, which are bent on destroying the cult. He earns the respect of the cult's members and becomes its leader after mastering the skill "Heaven and Earth Great Shift". He reforms the cult and helps to improve its relations with other sects. He becomes a key figure in leading the rebel forces to overthrow the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. Throughout his adventures, Zhang Wuji finds himself entangled in a complex web of love relationships with four maidens. The first, Zhu Er （蛛儿）, is a horribly disfigured girl who is actually his maternal cousin. The second, Xiao Zhao (小昭), is a Zoroastrian Chinese-Persian servant girl who understands him very well. The third, Zhou Zhiruo （周芷若）, is a childhood friend who previously saved his life when they were young. He develops a strong bond with her. The fourth, Min Min Temur (敏敏特穆尔)，known to him as Zhao Min (赵敏), is a Mongol princess (princess Shao Min, 绍敏) and his former arch-rival. In the middle of the novel, these four maidens are on an island to find Zhang Wuji's godfather. One day, when they wake, they find that they have been poisoned and Zhu Er is apparently killed due to her previous injury. The Dragon Slaying Sabre, previously in Xie Xun's possession, and the Heavenly Sword, previously in Zhao Min's possession, are missing. Zhao Min and their boat to get back to mainland China are also missing, leading Zhang Wuji to mistakenly perceive that she was the one who had poisoned them, unknowingly killed Zhu Er, and escaped to mainland China alone. Xiao Zhao then returns to Persia after it is revealed that she is destined to lead the Persian Ming Cult. Zhou Zhiruo soon falls in love with Zhang Wuji, but has to turn against him as she is bound by an oath she made in front of her teacher Miejue, who hates and distrusts Zhang Wuji and anyone related to the Ming Cult. Miejue devises a vicious scheme for Zhou Zhiruo to seize the two weapons by exploiting Zhang Wuji's love for Zhou. Zhou Zhiruo also turns vicious after Zhang Wuji reneges his promise to marry her and swears vengeance on him. Zhao Min was initially Zhang Wuji's rival as they were on opposing sides. However, Zhao Min gradually falls in love with Zhang Wuji after their various encounters, and she even turns against her clan to help him. At the end of the novel, Zhang Wuji decides to retire from the jianghu after he mistakenly believes that the Ming Cult's members are plotting to betray him. He decides that Zhao Min is his true love and they leave to lead a reclusive life far away from society. (The second edition of the novel has an ambiguous ending about Zhang Wuji's relationship with Zhou Zhiruo.) Zhang Wuji gave up an opportunity to become a ruler when the Ming Cult on the verge to overthrew the Yuan dynasty. Ideally, Zhang would have become the new emperor, but instead, the general Zhu Yuanzhang seizes command of Ming Cult's military and unites most of China's rebel forces. After capturing the city of Nanjing, he enrobes himself in the Dragon Robe and establishes the Ming dynasty as the Hongwu Emperor. Four years later, the founding emperor's subordinate, Xu Da, leads an attack on the Yuan capital (present-day Beijing), where the Hongwu Emperor is finally legitimately enthroned under the Mandate of Heaven. The Yuan remnants retreat to the Eurasian Steppe after losing China, where they establish the Northern Yuan dynasty under the leadership of Toghon Temür. The Mongols continue their war with the Ming dynasty, scheme to reconquer China but ultimately failed to overpower the Han Chinese's now- strengthened forces under the Ming. In 2005, Jin Yong published a third edition of the novel, which has a slightly different ending from the earlier versions. In this edition, Zhang Wuji feels disillusioned after failing to save a general's life and addressing Han Lin'er's death. He relinquishes his leadership of the Ming Cult to Yang Xiao and Fan Yao, and then leaves the Central Plain with Zhao Min. 

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Poirot is summoned to Nasse House in Devon by Ariadne Oliver, who is staging a Murder Hunt as part of a summer fête the next day. At Nasse House, Mrs Oliver explains that small aspects of her plans for the Murder Hunt have been changed by requests from people in the house rather deviously, until a real murder would not surprise her. The wealthy Sir George Stubbs owns Nasse House. His much younger wife is the beautiful Hattie, Lady Stubbs. She shows interest in fine clothes and jewellery only, appearing simple to all but her husband's secretary, Miss Brewis, who sees through Hattie's outward appearance but is herself conflicted because of her own feelings for her employer, Sir George. Hattie and George were introduced by Amy Folliat, the last of the family who had owned the estate for centuries. Widowed, Mrs Folliat lost her two sons during the War. With the death duties very high in the post-war period, she had to sell the ancestral home and grounds to keep it intact. She took on the orphaned Hattie, introducing her in society. Mrs Folliat rents the lodge on the estate. Michael Weyman, an architect, is on site to design a tennis court; he criticises the inappropriate location of a recently built folly. Sir George shouts at three young tourists who cross his private property; they are a Dutch woman, an Italian woman, and a man wearing a shirt decorated with turtles. On the day of the fête, Hattie receives a letter from her cousin, Etienne de Sousa, who will visit that day; she appears very upset by his abrupt visit. A local Girl Guide, Marlene Tucker, waits in the boathouse to pose as the dead victim when a player finds the key to enter. Her first visitor is Miss Brewis with a tray of refreshments at tea time, at Hattie's request. With Mrs Oliver, Poirot discovers Marlene dead in the boathouse. Hattie cannot be found. Mrs Oliver produces an abundance of theories to explain the murder and the disappearance, while the police and Poirot narrow the field from all attending the fête, to those familiar with the Murder Hunt. The investigation focuses first on Etienne de Sousa and briefly on Amanda Brewis. Further confusion is added by the behaviour of the Legges, staying in a cottage on the estate and whose marriage is in trouble. After weeks of no progress, Poirot visits Devon again, learning that Hattie is still missing. Merdell, the old boatman, who drowned, was Marlene's grandfather. Poirot puts together several stray clues: Marlene's grandfather had seen a woman's body in the woods; Marlene received small sums of money used to make small purchases, now in her younger sister's possession. Merdell had told Poirot mischievously that there would "always be Folliats at Nasse House". In the dénouement, Poirot explains that Sir George Stubbs is really Amy Folliat's younger son, James, a war deserter. Mrs Folliat paired him with the wealthy but naive Hattie, hoping that the marriage would be beneficial to both. But James fleeced Hattie of her money to establish his new identity and to purchase the old family home. Unknown to Mrs Folliat, James had married a young Italian woman after deserting the war. He killed the original Hattie shortly after entering into the bigamous marriage, and his Italian wife played the role of Hattie thereafter. Marlene Tucker had learned the true identity of George Stubbs from her grandfather. Both were murdered separately, although the old man's death has been presumed accidental. The day before the fête, the fake Hattie poses as an Italian tourist staying in the nearby hostel. She switches between the two roles frequently over a 24-hour period. The fake Hattie sends Miss Brewis to bring refreshments to Marlene shortly before the girl is murdered. She kills Marlene then changes to the tourist guise, tossing the large hat she wore as Hattie in the river. She then leaves the area as the Italian tourist carrying a rucksack. The date of Marlene's murder had been selected to cast suspicion upon Etienne, who had written weeks earlier of his visit, as he told Inspector Bland. Having grown up with the real Hattie, Etienne would not have been fooled. Neither the arrests of the culprits nor legal charges against the despairing Mrs Folliat are mentioned. The novel concludes with the sounds of the police smashing up the folly to locate and exhume Hattie's body. 

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